Ginny Wood oral history transcript

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INTERVIEW WITH GINNY WOOD
BY ROGER KAYE NOVEMBER 10, 2002
MR. KAYE: This is an oral history interview with Virginia Hill Wood. It is being
conducted in her home in College, Alaska on November 10, 2002 by Roger Kaye. The
subject of this interview today is Ginny and Celia’s role in, and remembrances about
establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So Ginny tell me just briefly about
when you first heard about the effort to establish what is now the Arctic Refuge as a
wilderness.
MS. WOOD: I don’t know whether we heard it from George Collins and Lowell Sumner
who were our contacts. We kept running into them. Of course, Lowell has a little
airplane, and we had a little plane. They were parked together down on the park strip
when he was up here. It may have been the Muries. We knew Olaus because he’d come
up and visit his brother. But before we ever met Mardy, or ever was introduced to their
concept of saving the Refuge, we had [Abe?] Murie. I don’t know, have you read that
new book that’s just come out Changing Tracks?
MR. KAYE: Yes.
MS. WOOD: That’s interesting. The concept of wilderness, when it changed from being
some place where it’s just wild; the European concept, it’s just a desolate place, to this is
a ‘what it incorporates and what it meant’ is something that gradually came. I realized
that I probably had it as a little kid. I liked to be where there weren’t a lot of people. But
I never, was aware of the concept of wilderness. When we were asked to go and testify,
then whatever I said, that’s what I was thinking at the time.
MR. KAYE: So how did you become involved, yourself, in the campaign?
MS. WOOD: Well really what happened is that after these assorted people including
Bob Weedon who was just working for Fish and Wildlife then I think, and had been up
here doing his thesis for his Doctorate; and Fred and Dave Kline who was a graduate
student then, we were asked because we were neighbors of Fred’s. They asked us to
come on over. They wanted some people there who could get out and testify. So then, I
had some concept of wilderness by just being a bush pilot and flying over all of this
vastness. I was beginning to get a concept that wilderness is someplace that hasn’t been
cluttered up with people. Woody and I started changing our minds; we wanted a camp
where people came and went out in it and got a concept and weren’t out fighting the
wilderness. But what Bartlett, who was, it was right after Statehood….but what I
wanted to mention was that we were out in the hall afterwards, after we had been asked
to say something. We heard over and over from the other people who came; the miners
and businessmen. The theme of their talks was that they didn’t want outside
environmental organizations telling us how to run Alaska. The Sierra Club, the
Wilderness Society and the Wildlife Federation were the ones that they mostly knew
about. I don’t know who idea it was, Bob Wheedon or Fred’s or who, but they said
‘why don’t we start’ the only conservation movement then was more or less like what
the Outdoor Council has. There was a guy named Bud Boddie down in Juneau who was
well known. But he was beginning to get a little worried about timber cutting where it
would bother the fishing, or maybe over-shooting game. But wilderness was not a…but
they didn’t like any of those organizations. What Woody and I had been members of the
Sierra Club mainly because we liked to go skiing up at the lodges that they had. It was
more of an outing club when we first joined it. We got their literature. That’s where we
decided to form an organization that you have to be eligible to vote, and had voted in
either the Territory of Alaska or the new State of Alaska in order to be a voting member.
You could contribute some money if you wanted to, but to be able to vote, they wanted
members to be able to say they were Alaskans and we vote here. This represents our
feelings, and it’s our land. I think that’s when we decided that we couldn’t depend on of
the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, it had to come from inside.
MR. KAYE: So that was the Alaska Conservation Society?
MS. WOOD: Yes, and fortunately all of these people were Biologists. We had the, when
we went to testify on things after that, the first thing was to establish the Arctic National
Wildlife Range. I think that whether we’d met Collins and Lowell and the Muries, where
they came in I don’t remember, somewhere along there in the background too that we met
just because we were down at the camp at McKinley Park, and they all came through.
We always just ran into them. Lowell, when we met, we always talked about airplanes
with. It was he and George that went up and took some of those early rafting trips down
those rivers and they didn’t know anything about that in those days! It happened that
most of the membership and most of the board members were people like Fred, Bob
Wheedon, a guy down in Juneau, I can’t think of his name now; he established the whole
conservation [department] at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He was a giant
in the early days, and he was on the board. We’d go to hearings, and because we’d
always run our testimony through one of these guys to be sure we had the facts right. We
could go to hearings and the reaction would be, “Where did these people come from?
How do they know that?” When everybody else was going on just absolute greed and
were absolutely illiterate as far as ecology was concerned. I don’t know when the term
‘ecology’ came into my vocabulary. It was somewhere along the way, probably from
reading Aldo Leopold.
MR. KAYE: And you discovered Leopold when you or Woody worked for Denali Park?
MS. WOOD: They had a very limited library there and they had an old copy of it. I read
it and was very impressed. Before that I had read a lot of Indian lore as a youth and
Thoreau I had read and loved. Then I was weathered in in Galena for seventeen days and
we were staying at somebody’s house there. It was the CAA house because they were
out and they wanted somebody to keep the water running in there and flush the toilets so
it wouldn’t freeze. I was in there and that’s where I first read Bob Marshall’s work. The
first was his book on Arctic Village. But then, there was another one that he wrote later
that told of his travels. That really sparked my interest in wild Alaska. And just flying
over it. And just the vastness of it. It’s different from when you are flying over the
States. I was ferrying planes during the War. There was always a field you could…
MR. KAYE: What is it about Marshall’s writings that touched you?
MS. WOOD: Just his zest for seeing what was over the next ridge, which was mine as a
kid.
MR. KAYE: Was it that sense of horizons unexplored and discovery?
MS. WOOD: Yeah, and he was a good writer. And as I said my early thing was a zest
for adventure and seeing what’s over the hill. I always did, and still do camp when I
could get time off. I explored. I have been to the head of every river down there.
Sometimes I was by myself or with one of the staff. I just wanted to see. I was curious.
Then you begin to, when we were in camp, we began to feel…first you have to deal with
nature as sort of an adversary. The bridges will wash out, and so you have to wade the
rivers. You don’t close up in time and the big snow comes and you’re stuck out there,
and can’t get over the road. People ask me what was my vision in camp. We didn’t have
any vision. We just wanted to spend the summer there, and Woody wanted to finish
climbing Mount McKinley, which he did. He was with the group that made the first
traverse of the mountain. He had this childhood of just exploring the woods of Maine
until he found Colorado. Then, he was doing it in the Army. Then is was his solace,
hiking in the …. I know that mostly, in camp we used to think that we needed to develop
McKinley Park because there was no facilities for people. There wasn’t anything. Then
we began to ask if we really wanted to do that. It began changing. We had opportunities,
and we couldn’t start a camp with no money. We tried to borrow some at the Bank and
they said, ‘that’s not worth anything’, we couldn’t borrow anything on it. And that was
good because we never had to pay back anybody. We always paid our bills in October
from what we charged during the summer. But I think the concept that, ‘Wait a minute,
this is a place where you can make a headquarters and stay and get immersed in what’s
out there’ we decided not to have a TV, not to had a bar. This was not because we were
teetotalers, but mainly because we didn’t want to see beer cans all the way back along the
highway. Nature was telling us what we were doing wrong. I always remember Conrad’s
writings of the sea saying that the sea is not for you or against you it’s just very
unforgiving of errors. That’s what flying is in the north, and that’s what mountain
climbing it. I had done a lot of mountain climbing and skiing in the northwest. Whether
you are climbing a mountain like Rainer or Baker, or skiing then was going cross-country
on your skis to the highest mountain you could find to ski down on. But it was getting
away from tows and from where everybody else was skiing. We didn’t say, “Oh, I want
to go out in the wilderness”.
MR. KAYE: How about the idealism? I am reading the Conservation Review that you
edited here for ACS. You are always quoting Leopold and Marshall here, particularly
Leopold. When did you first discover him?
MS. WOOD: It was that first year when Woody and I were down at McKinley in the
Library. There was no road. All we had was the plane to get out of there. There was no
road that came into McKinley so you were pretty much…and somebody left us a copy
there. I still have it. I took it!
MR. KAYE: You once told that you had Aldo Leopold’s Sancony Almanac on your
bedstand through the Arctic Refuge campaign.
MS. WOOD: Yeah.
MR. KAYE: That must have influenced the way you thought about that place.
MS. WOOD: Well, he was as you know was marvelous writer. He had a way of saying
things. He just had a way with words. I could have read the same thing and it could have
been deadly dull. But his writings, and I keep reading it over and over. I think everybody
should read it once a year, just to … You find new meanings and new expressions. Just in
one paragraph he can say something so succinctly. There again, his wilderness was a little
farm up in Wisconsin, except when he was first working for the Forest Service.
Everybody remembers that story about when he stopped being a wolf hunter. That
dying wolf, the last green light in that wolf’s eye. But then he became an ecologist.
Shooting wolves meant that there was going to be an overproduction of deer. My
concepts of that started then. Being able to use words so beautifully to describe
something. He had such a down to earth, hands on concept. And where he got his
concepts of ecosystems and how that works, and controls and so forth. So that was my
beginning of some formal biology. When you first came up in the wintertime, you went
to courses at the University, everybody did. The average age there was forty. They were
waiting for jobs to open up in the summer. I took a course in ecology. Odom was the
textbook. The guy was not a very good lecturer, but he did expose me to the learned part
of biology and ecology. Odom’s textbook was excellent on that. I still have it. Just the
fundamentals of looking at how everything is connected to everything else and the
fundamentals of ecology. I really, that took everything of others that had just been
philosophical and put it in a background of. .. since then I have collected and I have a big
library.
MR. KAYE: I’ve got a copy here of your testimony in 1959 before the Senate Sub-
Committee that held hearings here in Alaska on the proposal to establish the Arctic
Refuge. You make the statement, “Wilderness is of the highest importance to science as a
standard for reference. It is a laboratory where biologists of today and the future can
study to find answers to the reoccurring question, what was the natural order before man
changed it?” Did you get those ideas from Leopold and your Ecology classes?
MS. WOOD: I can’t tell you now. But I did…I forget when Alaska was a Territory and
when it was a State. Yes, I had taken that class by then. We established the
Conservation society and I told you why. All of the guys that were in it were biologists
or botanists. I was one of the few people involved that didn’t have a formal degree in it.
We had been exposed to it.
MR. KAYE: So, you thought that this was an important purpose of setting the Arctic
Refuge aside?
MS. WOOD: Yeah! And I suppose that what I was thinking then, I must have
expressed better than I could now. You can read that, instead of listening to me!
MR. KAYE: At that time, did you plan on going up and actually experiencing the Arctic
Refuge? Or, were you motivated perhaps more for other reasons?
MS. WOOD: At that time, except, and I quit flying commercially then because my
daughter was born in 1956. You can’t be weathered in in a place when you’re nursing a
kid! Woody had a commercial license too, but he didn’t do it much. We had a plane at
camp. We couldn’t have built a camp without a plane. There was no road connecting the
McKinley Park to it. But I think that probably operating Camp Denali when we were
trying to working…for instance the first thing we did was to go up and drag some logs
down to use for foundations for our tent cabins with old military Jeep which was the
only car we owned then, up over the tundra. And what did that do but go down to the
mineral soil? And the next thing we knew we had a creek coming down through camp.
You don’t do that. Then, just that we didn’t sell beer at camp. We could have made a lot.
We needed money badly, but then we’d see all of those tin cans all the way back to…then
our feeling more and more was that what we were doing, like our experience in Europe,
giving people a place to stay and not just come one night. They could stay and get
immersed in nature. Finally, the first thing I did when everybody came was I took them
on a hike to what I called the “clover ponds”, where they spent the day just going from
pond to pond and seeing what was in them. It’s not a hard hike, and you are walking on
tundra. You point out things like, “where you are walking, that’s one of our willows”.
Then you get, without making it a formal thing, because I didn’t have a degree in it, but
what happened was be sure you know what you’re talking about if you make a
statement. Because you may have somebody that is the head of a department, or has his
Ph. D., or wrote a book on that subject. People that came to camp, they were the ones
that taught me. This was what they did. They enjoyed being in a place like that, but
they knew ecology. They were birders. They were people [knowledgeable]. I learned an
awful lot from the people that came there who had degrees, when I started thinking about
the science of wilderness.
MR. KAYE: So your motivation for getting involved in the refuge campaign, was it
because you wanted to go there and experience it as wilderness, or were there other
[reasons]?
MS. WOOD: I guess I didn’t think about that. Because when I had done my flying when
I first came up here, that’s how I made a living was flying charter. It was mostly up to
Nome and Kotzebue and we’d get weathered in in little native villages. You should know
about that. It was just flying over this country and just looking at it. Before I came to
Alaska right after I got out of the War and even during the War when I was ferrying
planes, everybody else was going where there were fields to land in. I was exploring. I
can remember flying P-51’s and P-38’s that had never been in the air before and taking
them over the Sierras, even in the desert and over the Red Rock country in New Mexico
on the way to Newark, New Jersey to deliver the planes. I was always looking down to
find places that I’d want to go hiking when the War was over. I did go back and find
some of those very places I looked down at.
MR. KAYE: In the mid 1950’s when you got involved, what was it, that you thought
you’d go to this place and have fun there? Or was it something broader?
MS. WOOD: We started camp in 1952. We staked it out in 1951. The summer before
that I was down in Katmi. I had flown for Wing Airlines and some local people charter. I
had taken stuff out to Nome and Kotzebue. I had looked down on a lot of wilderness and
I thought that it would be fun to, you know, paddle that river. It was the concept of
being on the ground and exploring that, that would entertain me. Besides, it was a good
way to remember landmarks. In seat of your pants flying, you pay attention to the
ground. They don’t anymore, they just dial it. I think it was like sight seeing from the
air. And even when I was down in the southwest, I was always looking. And I was
always saying how that would be fun to explore on foot. I often deviated from the course
I was supposed to be on because I wanted to see over the next hill or look at those
interesting rocks. I guess it was, as I said, a sense of curiosity and adventure, and just
wanted to see what it looked like from the ground to feel it and to smell it.
MR. KAYE: At this time in the 1950s and you are working with ACS did you plan to
actually go there necessarily?
MS. WOOD: No, I didn’t see how there would be any opportunity because you
wouldn’t want to go there in the wintertime. I mean, I didn’t hanker to be the first one
there, or on a dog team trip. No, it was the concept of having someplace that maybe
some day…. But it wasn’t one of those places that I had seen from the air and wanted to
get on the ground. I was busy in McKinley Park exploring. There was just nobody else
in the Park but us. And I never ran into anyone else.
MR. KAYE: So tell me about the concept that appealed to you, of protecting this place.
Was it just knowing that it would be there?
MS. WOOD: I think at that time, it was the fact that I was beginning to get, without
expressing it orally, the we were getting too clever, but weren’t very smart. We don’t
have wisdom, but we are very clever, and so our technology is running ahead of us. I
think Mardy, maybe I read it out of her book, but she said that her reason was for some
place where you leave nature alone and it is devoid of technology. After World War II we
began to have all of these mechanical things. Too many people were getting too rich and
using technology to either develop resources or for pleasure. You need some places that
nobody has done anything to. Then, I was beginning to read and take courses in ecology
and the concept of it. I don’t know which came first. But the idea that if for nothing else,
how are you going to know how to fix something if you don’t know what it was like
originally and what nature is doing? There is that concept that nature has it’s own
economy. It’s the economy of nature. Sure, it’s tooth and claw but it has its rhythms.
We go in and try to fix it, we build roads and people come and throw their garbage around.
So pretty soon you’ll never know what your baseline was, what it was like. Then of
course, that was the whole thing with Project Chariot. That became one of the first things
we took up when we organized. That was they wanted to put this nuclear explosion up
to show that they could use it for peaceful uses. The idea that using a nuclear bomb for
peaceful uses, well, that wasn’t what the military wanted. They just wanted to get a
bigger explosion that people weren’t complaining about like they were in Nevada. They
said that that was their idea. Well this is wilderness, and it won’t hurt anybody so we
can make them as big as well can to see what happens. Then when they came up to sell it
to the University, so they would back it, of course the University did but not people that
worked on it. Then of course a lot of my friends, the biologists that were working out
there said, “Wait a minute, you’ve picked this place which is very biologically rich. You
picked it because you thought it was remote and desolate and wouldn’t anybody.’
People live off of the resources here. And the winds keep the ridges swept so the
Caribou are wintering there. The ocean currents are such there that make them very rich
biologically. When they picked it, they didn’t see that. They just went to a map and felt
like this was far away from anybody that would complain about it, and there’s nothing
there. “We’ll advertise it, and if we make a harbor there they can use it for the vast
commerce with the orient.’ They said there were vast resources that could be developed.
There wasn’t anything. Because all of my friends were biologists, and in all fields, were
working up there from anthropology to biology, even the geologists said this was crazy.
We were getting information from all of them and sending it right directly back to the
Department of the Interior.
MR. KAYE: Reading through the Alaska Conservation Society news bulletin that you
edited, and in some of the things you told me before, it seems like much of the effort that
you guys expended was kind of a response or a reaction against the post-World War II
economic and technological boom that we saw. Is that true, do you think?
MS. WOOD: Well, I can’t speak for everybody. Bob Wheedon saw, as a biologist, what
Fred Dean saw. Some of the others, this was their field of study. For those that went
out there like Les Verick, he thought it was neat just to be able to go out there. And Bill
Pruitt too. They were all close friends and neighbors. Each of them would sit and talk
about it, and I suppose I was collecting information from them. I was the editor and
sometimes I was the editor because with everybody else, they were biologists and they
would have lost their jobs if they had…. Like Bob Wheedon. I was never the writer that
Bob was. He was a giant both philosophically and in what he wrote and as a person. He
was probably an Aldo Leopold in his own right. But he had a Ph. D. and he could write
papers. I remember that I was President for a time because we couldn’t find anybody
else who wouldn’t lose their job until they got Dr. Wood. Then, Dr. Wood was one of
the promoters of Project Chariot and he was firing people who weren’t… you know that
history. Fred Dean said, “Let him do it, he can’t shut us up if he’s going to do all of
that!” When he was through at the University, he ran to be head of the Borough. He was
thick into political things. We felt like he couldn’t say anything about us if this was what
he was doing as President.
MR. KAYE: As far as the Arctic Refuge campaign, do you think that, as well, was kind
of a reaction against what people saw happening in the 1950’s and not wanting it to
happen up there?
MS. WOOD: I can’t speak for anybody else, but if you read what they said, then you
got probably what they were thinking at that time. What you think of know, is what you
think you thought then, at my age. It was a learning experience. Alaska is like a small
town on a party-line. It’s very hard for somebody to hide their dirty linen. You get
involved in things that you wouldn’t do outside. If I was in Seattle or New York I would
be going skiing and liking the mountain and going and doing it and exploring to see what
was over the hills but it wouldn’t have been done as an environmentalist. I think that up
here my best friends and neighbors were the leaders in the biology and conservation
[movements]. I took Fred Dean’s course in Resource Use. We were just beginning to
realize that there was over-use. He said that when we’ve used up all of the land there was
always the sea. That would be the last place that we would have, so we’d better not
muck it up. The big thing now, that we are running on worldwide, even the National
Geographic which never used to touch things like this, is water just to grow crops and
drink.
MR. KAYE: In your testimony at the Senate Sub-Committee hearing that you attended
here you told the Committee “that it’s a psychological lift that the visitor gets just
knowing that beyond that ridge, across that valley, behind the mountain, there are no
roads, power lines or people, just virgin country”. What does that express about how
you felt at the time about the special kind of wilderness experience that people ought to
be able to have in what is now the Arctic Refuge?
MS. WOOD: As you were saying that, the episode comes to mind. We visited Les and
Terry Verick when he was working on his Ph.D. at Colorado. They were taking care of a
Science Camp, which was up in the mountains. We were outside to pick up a car for
camp. We went on a ski trip where you climbed the ridges in the Rockies. I had never
been in the Rockies before. It was an all day trip. We spent the day climbing up and had
a run back down. We finally got up, after all day climbing on skis up threw and above the
timberline. We got up to the crest of the mountains, and looked down, and there was a
highway. It struck me that we had spent all day, to see what’s on the other side of this
ridge. And when we get over there, there’s a major highway with cars going up and down.
Still, where we were was great. It was wilderness. And I thought when I do that in
Alaska, in McKinley Park you look down and see more and more…you never see any
man made thing. Where I may have read Leopold and Thoreau and all of these people
who had conveyed that we needed someplace more or less that man hasn’t changed. You
are meeting nature on it’s own terms, whether as a scientist or just as a sightseer.
MR. KAYE: In your testimony you mention “nameless peaks”. Mardy Murie and
others talked about namelessness and not naming features. Do you think that is
important for a place like Arctic Refuge? In several of your writings you mentioned that
namelessness was an aspect of this place.
MS. WOOD: Yeah, because what happens when the USGS names them, or when we
people name them, it’s usually named after some political person or somebody’s aunt or
uncle. It’s just putting man…I am not a religious person in terms of a… I might be
spiritual, but not any the form of any one religion. Going around and putting man’s
names on it because it was a political guy like when they tried to change the name of
Denali for a while. Naming things after a politician or somebody’s girlfriend or wife or
husband who had died [is silly]. One place in McKinley Park they named after a pilot
who crashed and killed himself when he was doing something that was a damned fool
thing in the first place. He gets a place named after him. That was Scott Peak. It had just
had a number before. I think that the thing about it now, as I realize after being in the
Arctic a lot, and exploring some of the rivers on foot, I can’t pronounce them and I never
learned to because they are Eskimo names. I can’t tell anybody where I was because I
can’t pronounce it and I didn’t even learn to pronounce it. I say, “Go find it yourself”. If
you are going to name something give it the native name because it was their map, it told
you what it was. “ This is the place that meets the other. The rivers meet here, and
there’s a lot of fish there.” That’s what the name means. There is a roadmap in their
names for things. It’s their guidepost. It tells you what it is as you probably well know.
So, if you’re going to name something, find out what the native name is first.
MR. KAYE: But what’s lost to a name when you do name a feature after a …?
MS. WOOD: Well, if it already has one, and there is a reason why they had it… do it,
instead of naming it after somebody that was never there, or for a political reason, or for
your wife or girlfriend or some other reason. I think that naming it is…but you can’t say
that you don’t want it to have a name because it’s pretty hard to navigate. It’s like trying
to explain how to get to somebody’s house if you don’t have a street number or name.
It’d be nice if it were like it was when I first got here. None of the streets were named.
Mardy, when she was flying over a river in Katmi, asked the pilot what river it was, and
he said he didn’t think it had a name. He passed a note back. She quoted a poem by
Robert Service who was a pilot.
MR. KAYE: He was in the Arctic.
MS. WOOD: I think that particular time she was in Katmi. And I know the river
because I have been over it myself. She was up here when they were doing the
[unintelligible] days when they were flying. Celia was doing the same thing. She and
Celia were in the same plane crash with Abe Thayer [?] But I don’t think any of them
ever flew down there. I think it was one of the local pilots.
MR. KAYE: What did she or you think is lost to a name when you do start naming
features after folks?
MS. WOOD: Well, the name usually doesn’t have anything to do with anybody that was
even there or saw it. I think that it’s an ego thing, or a political thing.
MR. KAYE: Do you think that an ego-centered action is inappropriate in a place like
that?
MS. WOOD: I remember when the boys made the traverse of Mount McKinley and
then said that this was probably, and getting to the top wasn’t even their aim, they just
wanted to get to the head of the Ruth Glacier and explore all of that country behind there
that nobody’s even been in, just to see what was on the other side. And incidentally,
they climbed to the top. Elton made the comment, I found it in a letter he had written to
his wife when he was planning it, that this was probably the first expedition no one will
ever hear about, that’s how much they cared about publicity. Of course, he was killed on
the summit and had a lot of publicity. That’s why I never told anybody up in the Arctic
when I was guiding. Ramon and I did a lot of exploring, mostly for places to take people.
But we never… a lot of those that do have Eskimo names are very hard to pronounce.
We purposely didn’t learn them. Somebody else would take their people there. And the
other thing was, somebody would come back and say that they had been to the
headwaters of such and such and did this and this, and this and saw saw this and this, and
this. I used to say that why I liked exploring the tundra was because there wasn’t any
trails except for an animal one, and they go across the water. You can’t wade like they
can. Every time you take a step you are there. It isn’t a destination. It isn’t like when
you hiking in the States. You go five miles to Lost Lake. In your mind, yes, you notice
things along the way and you know it’s a good hike, but you’re not there until you get to
the sign that says where you were going. But in McKinley Park, or in the Arctic people
ask “Well, where are we going to camp?” And I tell them, “Well, I don’t know. When we
find a good place, and we’re tired.” The concept that we have to get “there”, or “we
haven’t arrived”, is bad. For instance, we had people when we rafted the Hula-Hula and
you take out on a bench down, of course somebody and land, and it always changes
because the river takes out where you can land. It isn’t too far from Barter Island, and
they come in and get you. So you wait there, and isn’t very far away. It’s probably a
half an hour’s flight. But then you’re waiting. And it’s always funny, because when
they first land up at the headwaters out in the Brooks Range they say, “Oh, I could stay
here forever! I don’t care if I never leave!” These are business men and as soon as you
get back and you’re there, then they want to know when the plane is coming because they
have to get back to a board meeting, or they have to do this, or, their wife is having a baby
or something. They’ll pace, wondering why the pilot wasn’t there. I said, “probably
because he’d busy somewhere else”. Or else you could look at the weather and say, “I
wouldn’t want to go back with him, even if he came.” It’s bad weather. I remember doing
this with guys who were from the Wilderness Society; it was a nice sunny day, but they
just hadn’t gotten “there”, and I said, “Listen, instead of just pacing and asking me every
ten minutes what will we do if they don’t come, just look at your watch and go for
twenty minutes in any direction. Then, sit down and stay for twenty minutes. Then
come back and tell me what you saw.” Then they would come back and say, “I know
what you mean”.
MR. KAYE: Mardy Murie talked about not naming places and wilderness more or less
as a gesture of respect for the place.
MS. WOOD: That would be another way of saying it, like Mardy would. She is much
more eloquent than when I said it.
MR. KAYE: Do you agree with that?
MS. WOOD: Oh yeah. It’s very hard. Fairbanks didn’t have any house numbers or
street names when I first got here. You knew where the people lived. They lived next to
the brown house, just past the white house. Now, those houses aren’t even there
anymore. I go to Fairbanks, I can’t find anything because I don’t know the street
numbers. I find them by the buildings. If they took down the purple house, I’ve lost
myself. I think that it would be silly to say, “I don’t want any name”, but I think that
being able to have natural features, and if you give them names, see if there isn’t a native
name for it because that will tell you what it is. It told them. It told you, ‘that’s the
place where the fish come’, or ‘this is the place that runs into that’, or ‘this is the place
where the biggest trees are’. That’s what the names says. That’s a map. That’s a guide,
and that fine. But just naming it after people as a political thing, or somebody you don’t
know that’s never been there, that is. But there can be certain times when giving it a name
after somebody who had, some particular reason, it was part of the story. If it’s part of
the story and somebody was there, first person; or you can’t just say, ‘I can’t tell you
where it is because it doesn’t have a name’, that’s gets a little bit beyond. Because
everybody did give it names, the natives did, but it tells a story, and what was there. It
was the natural features. It was like you describing a ridge beyond the next one that’s
higher than the one before, or something like that. When you stop to think about it, I can
see everybody’s concept. But my concept is when I am taking people on hikes in the
wilderness, is this, you don’t know where we’re supposed to get to because you haven’t
been there before. Or, well, shall we sit down here and have lunch and then we’re there?
Then you can look around and enjoy it!
MR. KAYE: Another word, or concept that I see repeating in your testimony and in
your writings is “wildness”. You use the word, “wild” country, “wildness”. What’s the
essence of wildness? What is the significance of this place, not only scenic and has
animals, but it’s wild?
MS. WOOD: Well, you could do use wild in lots of different concepts as far as the
dictionary goes. But I think in wildness, when you’re thinking about the wilderness is a
concept of the lack of technological manipulation by man. Wildness gets changed. The
[unintelligible] surges can completely change the scenery in a very short period of time,
from something that you could hardly see to something that was almost up to the road.
Landslides blocked the Stony River and we had a three-quarter mile lake there for a long
time. It was super saturated and from a lot of rain, and there might have been a little
earthquake that disturbed it. Then when things are in the permafrost…. [neighbors
approach, tape stops]
…it’s meaning something that is hard to describe. Because it means that if you did it, and
they say “Now, tell me what you mean by that”. That gets to a place where each one has
something that you can’t put into words. It’s a feeling. Everybody’s feelings are a little
different, maybe. Wildness is something to me, that hasn’t been manipulated by man or
any machines. It’s like trying to describe to a guy that wants to climb a mountain on a
snow machine why there’s a difference between going there on skis or snowshoes or foot
and going on a machine. He can’t understand what you’re talking about because he’d
trying to see what he can make his machine do. Then, he wants to know, “Why do you
do it?” First, it’s a matter of tranquility, sanctuary and what your body can do, the
challenge. It isn’t to try to compete, change, or conquer. They use the word “conquer” in
mountaineering. Most mountain climbers will say, “The mountain yielded”. There’s a
difference.
MR. KAYE: For a place like the Arctic, when we see that word wildness used by you
and others, is it just knowing that the place isn’t changed or altered even though you
wouldn’t see an alteration, but just knowing that it’s unaltered that’s important?
MS. WOOD: I think the concept is, and we didn’t realize it when we came up here, it
was an adventure, but then you begin to see what has happened by altering things. And
reflecting back you realize that this wasn’t the way it was when you first got here. You
get to thinking, “How am I affecting…?”
MR. KAYE: I’d like to go on and talk about some of the people you got to know and
work with. You got to know many of the people that were instrumental in establishing
this place and stayed here in your house where we are know. Tell me about Lowell
Sumner. What’s your impression of him? I know what he did.
MS. WOOD: He was a big kid! And they had a very good relationship with Collins. He
called him “Doc” because he had a Ph. D., and I don’t think Collins ever had one. But he
was a kid. He was very funny. Aiden Murie had no use for airplanes. He didn’t like
them. He liked us, but he had to forgive us our sins. I told him that it was another way
of being in another realm of wilderness up in the clouds and the weather. I agreed with
him in that I would use a plane to find out where I wanted to go on the ground. But
people in the Park Service didn’t have planes except Lowell. And he had this old
Luscome which always…I can remember him more than anything else with wrench
working under the hood trying to find out what was wrong with it. Luscome’s didn’t
have too high a grade compared to the Piper Cub and the like. But he loved that plane.
MR. KAYE: What about his ideas? He was considered a visionary in the Park Service.
MS. WOOD: I really don’t know as when we talked about Lowell. At one time he was
married to a woman who we knew, but they divorced. I think that she didn’t think much
of him as a husband. I liked Lowell for what he was as a person. I don’t think we ever
discussed things like…he was always working on his airplane.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about George Collins. He always referred to you and Celia as “the
girls” when I interviewed him.
MS. WOOD: Because he was a lot older! As I said, Woody and I met him first when
they came in to Katmi and he wanted to get down to the lake. We took him down in the
motor boat. Then Celia met him when she was running the roadhouse for Wayne over in
Kotzebue. He was staying there. He was the one who told her the it would be nice if
there was someplace in McKinley Park except that “damned big hotel”. He said that all
the Park Service thinks about is getting up another big hotel. He felt that there should be
some place where people could stay out in the wilderness longer, not for just a one- night-stand.
Of course then, the concept for hotels in National Parks was to have a band, and
tennis courts and a golf course to entertain you while you were there. It was sort of the
European idea of the Spa. He didn’t think that, but at the same time he felt that there
should be facilities, mainly so that people would stay in one spot, and then explore it on
foot. And take it as it comes, you know, the weather and whatever. That resonated with
us, and he talked to Celia about that. When she came back, and we when out with her to
look for a place where Wing Airlines could have for people to stay overnight so that
people could stay in the place. The resonated with Woody and Celia and I because we
had all done it in Europe and found out that Europeans did that. It wasn’t for wilderness,
it was because you stayed in one spot because nature predominated, not in our concept of
wilderness but you are in the mountains. You go walking and you touch it and you feel it
and you smell it and you hear it. And not as a scientist, it was just something that you
grew up doing. Up until World War II, they didn’t have cars. You took a train or a bus
with your family, and you stayed in a little inn. They didn’t have the concept of tents so
much. They had hut systems, and they didn’t want tents because they didn’t want
people camping all over and leaving their garbage. This was in places like Switzerland and
Austria. You walked, and you stayed in the huts. These were sometimes nothing but a
great big bench with straw in it and everybody just slept in their sleeping bags. They
were not fancy places. And there were the fancy places too. But even then, it was
customary to either be skiing or walking.
MR. KAYE: One of George’s concerns was that if this Arctic Refuge became…
MS. WOOD: Has he died now?
MR. KAYE: Yes, he died two years ago now.
MS. WOOD: That’s right, you told me that. He was way in his nineties and he was still
writing to us.
MR. KAYE: I think he was ninety-four. He had reservations about it becoming a Park
because he was afraid of Mission 66.
MS. WOOD: I remember that. All of us were discussing about what the Refuge should
be. And Fred could tell you this. So could Bob Wheedon and all of us discussed this.
We probably talked it over with him too, but I don’t remember the conversation. I just
remember one of the questions was “who should manage it?’ And we were very afraid of
a National Park, because if it were, everybody would go there, and you’d have to have a
big hotel and concessionary. Then there was the issue of the BLM. That would have
been the best because they didn’t do that. One branch of them was in the business of
disposing of land and that’s what they did. They sold land. So it came down to the Fish
and Wildlife Service. The essence of that was not wilderness as far as geography was
concerned as much as it was for the wildlife. I think it was Olaus Murie and Sig Olsen,
whom we knew very well. He stayed at the camp. And Sig in the Wilderness Society
and was on the board when she was Chairman of the Board. I knew him well at camp by
just talking to him. His concept of wilderness was lakes and wildness. But the feeling
was that it losses what you set it aside for, if it becomes just destination for everybody to
go to. That’s when we could see, and Woody and I first thought “Well, gee, there’s
nothing here for anybody here in the Park, except for the little bus trip out to Pinecone
Pass.” There was a hotel from which you couldn’t even see the mountain, and it wasn’t
even part of the Park. It isn’t tundra. The concept that Switzerland has, to keep it’s
wildness is that people stay in huts, and you don’t let them camp. You don’t have any
control over the garbage and having it cluttered up with campers in a little country like
that, so they have to stay in the huts.
MR. KAYE: What else do you remember about George? What impressions did you get
of Collins and his proposal for a last great wilderness?
MS. WOOD: He knew George. We used to tease him in California, when we lived in
Mill Valley. He was quite a raconteur and hilariously funny. He had a sense of humor
that wouldn’t stop. When we first knew him, he was just that guy that worked for the
Park Service that we were supposed to take in the motorboat to show him Katmi. He
was sort of a Government Official. Celia got more chatty with him when he stayed over.
When he stayed in Katmi, he stayed over at the Fish and Wildlife place. By trail it was
about two miles from where Woody and I were in a tent. I can remember visiting him and
I never laughed so much in my life! When you say him and his neighbors coming in to
chat, and he had just has a serious operation for cancer in his throat. He pulled through it
and they were coming to see him. I just remember him as absolutely hilarious. It was like
that. I never laughed so much in my life, when he was with his friends telling stories. It
wasn’t always about wilderness. There were also letters that he wrote to us. Actually
Celia probably knew him better because that was when she was high up in the Wilderness
Society. She saw him when he was talking about these issues. When Woody and I knew
him it was just like meeting somebody and have an interesting conversation with them.
MR. KAYE: How about Sigred Olsen? He played a role in establishing the Refuge.
MS. WOOD: Sig’s son was one of our first board members of the Conservation Society.
Sig., Jr. But he was stationed in Juneau and I didn’t get to know him like I knew Bob
Wheedon and the people who lived up here. Sig was… I remember us sitting down in the
sun under the windows of the lodge discussing more philosophical things. I really can’t
remember any one thing that he said. But I do remember that he was rather wise. He was
talking about his feelings about canoeing and paddling. I can’t remember what he told me,
and what I read in his books. I just remember that he was at camp when the Wilderness
Society was having their annual meeting there in 1962. Olaus Murie was there, but he
was pretty sick at that time. There was Sig, and we mostly discussed the problems in
McKinley Park.
MR. KAYE: Had you read Sig’s books at that time?
MS. WOOD: Not all of them, but some.
MR. KAYE: Some of them you had?
MS. WOOD: Yeah. See? I knew his son. I knew of him. And I always wanted to go on
a canoe trip up in that country. So I read some of his books. It didn’t strike me the way
Leopold did. It was interesting and good. Celia really should be here because he was on
her Board. She would give better in depth information. I can’t think of any. If I didn’t
know Sig Olsen, what you I have remembered about him? I think I was more interested
because he was Sig, Jr.’s Dad, and because I had read his book. Mostly we talked about
the problems in McKinley Park because that was when we felt like their idea was to see
how many people they could cram into it. He was telling me about the motor boat
problem in his country. He liked canoes and wilderness. And he felt that motor boats
would change wilderness. At that time, even the Park Service was at Boundary Waters.
It was the Forest Service. First you developed facilities and the Forest Service were my
heroes because they made the best trails. They used them for forest fire fighting. They
didn’t have them for cars. Sure, they sold lumber, but you didn’t see that. Where I grew
up at Lake Shallan was vast forest, Ponderosa Pine country. Everybody could use
lumber, there wasn’t a problem with that, but there was a marvelous trail system. It was
because they used them to patrol the forest.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about the Muries. Olaus and Mardy came here.
MS. WOOD: I got to know “Ad” much more. He and Weezie were living at Park
Headquarters when we first went. That winter is when they transferred out of there and
went to the Tetons. We just learned from him. Then in the Park, we could use Igloo
Camp Ground for our guests because nobody else was using it. It wasn’t developed. It
had pit toilets and that’s all. The surroundings there were entirely different from at the
other end of the Park where were. Within walking distance there was a lot of variety of
different things. Olaus would come down and talk to us around the campfire at night. Or
I would stop in and see him and ask him questions. I can remember Ad saying, “If I had
to do it over again, I’d have been an agronomist. You start with the soils, that’s the
foundation of everything”.
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MS. WOOD: He said that he had gone backwards, beginning with the critters and then
going to other things. Olaus was always very friendly. We’d see him when we were
hiking around Igloo and we’d see that head of white hair. We’d go over there. One time
there was a lamb that had just been killed by an Eagle. We went over and he gave a little
talk about predators and prey in his very kindly way. Then he and Charlie Ott, a
photographer from town taking pictures in the Park and Ad; we’d meet them hiking. I
remember one time they came hiking over the hill. I was out with a group from camp and
we must have been stopped looking at one of those ponds, or doing birding or something.
They came hiking over the hills. I don’t what they had been doing but they were just
having fun. Mel Lockwood, who was the photographer said, “I have a permit to do this”.
And he showed me the permit. It was from Ad. It said, “Mel can collect plants”.
The Wilderness Society had their annual meeting in 1962 at camp. Sig Olsen and
all of those guys were there for a week. I think I first met Mardy at a Sierra Club meeting
down in Seattle. A friend of mine was hosting it at his house. He introduced me to
Mardy. Olaus, I had met because he’d come up sometimes and of course he had down a
lot of work in the Park in the 1920’s. All I remember is that he and Ad were sitting under
a tree. [end of side A]
Woody and I were out to get a car to bring back to camp, a new car. Celia had
flown down I guess, to see her folks. We were invited to come to an Audubon
Convention or meeting down in California. We were invited to come over and give a talk
on Alaska and show some pictures. There, Olaus Murie was one of the featured
speakers. I don’t remember Mardy at that time, but it was Olaus. I had met him with his
brother and sat down and had lunch with them. I knew his brother well, year after year.
Mardy I first met to really know her, I guess, was when she was at camp and Olaus was
very sick. In fact, that was the last year of his life. They were staying in the A frame and
he would not accept a ride in the Jeep, even though he was a sick man. But he would get
his camera out and take pictures of the moose on the lake and insist on wandering around
and hiking a little bit. That was when they left and it was a very short time before he
went in to the hospital. He had relapses, and this was one of them. When Mardy and
Olaus took off to go up and stay in the Brooks Range. They were going up to see where,
or what would be the best boundary for the western boundary of the Arctic Refuge, if
they could get it established. That when they were up at first Lobo Lake and then Last
Lake. Lobo Lake is drained now.
MR. KAYE: Did they come and stay here at your house for a visit?
MS. MURIE: They didn’t stay here. The only ones that ever stayed here were Weezy
Murie when she married again after Olaus died. She came up to visit and they stayed
overnight here. The morning that they left to go up for that thing in the Arctic; I had
known George Schaller because I sat next to him in class. And Brina had a breakfast
party up there. They were leaving the next morning. I know the exact date because
Rommey was six days old. She was born on May 8th. So it was in late May when they
were leaving to go up.
MR. KAYE: So, you knew George Schaller?
MS. WOOD: Yeah, that was in one of Brina’s classes that I took. She taught everything.
In fact, George used to say that it would look funny on his resume when it showed that
he had gotten all of his Botany, Zoology from Brina Kessel! She ran the University!
And he was always hungry. He as always chewing on a stalk of celery or something in
class. Then, the other guy that went up with them was Kreer. He was a close friend of
Les and Terry’s when they were running the science school and we were skiing with
them. Woody knew him. They weren’t in the same outfit, but they were both in the
Mountain Division [Army] in Italy. We used to ski with him.
MR. KAYE: When Olaus and Mardie came back, in 1957 after their summer up on the
lake, they met with a lot of groups here in Fairbanks; conservation groups and
sportsmen’s groups. Do you remember that summer? Or would you have been in camp?
MS. WOOD: I don’t remember Olaus being along. I remember after he died, she came
back several times. I remember when the Conservation Society had a big picnic for her at
Larry Males. Then, she and a friend of hers had an old bus that they could sleep in. It
was one of those convertibles. Her name was Mildred Capron. She took movies, and she
was a neat lady. She and Mardy kid of ran around together after Olaus died. She lived in
one of the cabins at Moose. They came up and toured with that thing on the road
system, camping. And they came to our camp and parked down by where the cars were.
They stayed around for a while. We used to visit at the Ranch, when we were outside to
get a car we tried to visit if the weather was right. It was always wintertime and
sometimes you couldn’t get over the mountain. And if you did get over, you were afraid
you might not get back. If the passes were good, we’d go over and see Mardy and stay
there. When she was in Seattle, she was a friend of a close friend of mine. I would see her
there. And sometimes I would just go and see her, she was staying with her mother when
she was still alive. It was after Olaus died and I think she lived there for a while to take
care of her mother who was in her late eighties. There’s just little vignettes of Mardy and
the times that we had stayed on the Ranch.
MR. KAYE: I’ve just a couple more things. One thing I noticed through your writing
was that you talked about the pioneering philosophy in Alaska, in reference to the Arctic
Refuge. It’s almost as if, in your writings, you appreciate the frontier, but you didn’t
appreciate the pioneer attitude towards Alaska.
MS. WOOD: I think I used “pioneer” I would now use the word “frontier”. Frontier
attracts the best and the worst. And frontier means that you came up to exploit it, really.
Whether is was the west, or the pioneers that first came over to colonize New England; a
lot of them had to get out of where they were, or they were failures looking for a new
opportunity. So you got the scoundrels. If you got there first, you could start the first
business or exploit it. Rarely did you explore it, even though you get honored for being a
pioneer. Or else you were escaping persecution like the pilgrims or the Mormons. I
think Wally Stegner, who was at camp too. His writings were things that I really admired.
I didn’t get to know him much. But he made the comment that frontier…. Oh, I can’t
remember…I’ll find it for you. I used to have it posted up here. I think his concept of
frontier, because he grew up in the frontier of southern Canada up in the wheat and cattle
country. Then they moved down. He grew up in the 1920’s in the harsh reality of the
frontier. He said that with frontier, yes, you were opening up the country but in doing
that you’ve lost what you came for. He makes that in a very nice statement and I’ll see if
I can find it for you. The frontier was the place that you come to find the things that you
lose after you get there.
MR. KAYE: So I guess in that context, in your testimony, you didn’t want the Arctic
Refuge to be a frontier in that sense?
MS. WOOD: One of the other people I got to know was Jack Reid who was head of the
Geological Survey. I flew him from McKinley Park back up here. He was the one who
said, “I told the Muries that they should stay east of the Canning River, because right
there, there’s a big disconnect in the geology, and they’ll find oil.” They hadn’t even
found Prudhoe Bay then. But he said that they were going to find oil, and in pretty good
amounts, somewhere. But if you stay east, then they’d fine little seeps. He said there
were entirely different structures, and he explained it to me geologically; the chances of
finding any big find there. It was not very much later that they found Prudhoe Bay.
The other thing is when they were talking to Olaus and Mardy and Collins and
everybody; their concept was to find a place that was big enough so it would have all of
the biomes from the marine, the tundra, the alpine and the arboreal forest over the hill, and
big enough so that your ecosystem wasn’t just this little one. There also would be no
village except Potomac, no mining, or mining claims. The timber wasn’t big enough to cut.
It had no resources that anybody was interested in, or had someone to suggest that there
was until Prudhoe Bay. Even then, it was Jack Reid, who told me as I was flying him
back, that he had just told Olaus that. They were going up to find the logical boundary,
and it was originally a lot smaller. Then at some point it changed from the Range to the
Refuge. The more described what it was. Then, I remember Stevens. He was saying that
he wound’ t give one bit of money for managing it. And we said, “Goody, Goody,
Goody!”
MR. KAYE: That was Bartlett who said that, the Senator.
MS. WOOD: Was it!? I thought it was Stevens.
MR. KAYE: Stevens wasn’t a Senator yet.
MS. WOOD: But I think he got it from Stevens. We had already started the
Conservation Society and I remember we used to have a meeting each week. None of us
had telephones where we slept. We always had a bag lunch at the University. Any body
could come and sit in on it. It was very informal. We hadn’t had a constitution yet.
Everybody just put on the table what they had learned. It was a gossip thing. And with
all of the different disciplines, it was “well did you hear this?” or “Did you here that?”
When we heard the comment “Not one cent!”, we thought that was great!
MR. KAYE: You thought that would protect the area?
MS. WOOD: Yeah! A lot of times, when they manage it, that’s what the problem is!
MR. KAYE: I see that Bartlett, according to your notes and editorials in the New
Bulletin, as it was called then, met with you a couple of times. He was against the Refuge
Proposal.
MS. WOOD: I remember that hearing. That’s the only one I remember actually sitting
around him. That’s the one that is in the minutes of the Congressional Record. It’s
whatever I said there, you must have that. Because actually, Bartlett, who was an old
miner himself, and pretty much a developer, was so polite and cordial. Nobody put you
down or called you an extreme environmentalist. There were other people who did that.
The miners didn’t want the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society telling them how to
run Alaska. Bartlett was very kind and very… It wasn’t like when you used to have to
testify in front of Stevens, and Don Young later. They would just insult you. I
remember when I testified, and I had never done anything like that, I had a written
testimony and then he asked me some questions. I remember him saying, “Mrs. Wood,
do you know you have given an excellent testimony?” I thought, “Oh my gosh!”
Because I didn’t know what I had said, or …
MR. KAYE: Well, I have it here. He said, “Mrs. Wood, in my opinion, that was an
exceptionally well prepared and well presented testimony.”
MS. WOOD: Oh, it that what he said? I just remember that he complimented me on it.
MR. KAYE: Your words are extremely eloquent in describing the values in this place.
MS. WOOD: I think I read the whole thing. We just did it for… oh what’s his name?
The guy that was Fred Dean’s boss at the University. He was in charge of the Pittman
Roberts…
MR. KAYE: Funding.
MS. WOOD: Funding, and he was over Fred, and he was at the University. Very
shortly after that he was taken back to Washington, D. C. What’s the big Refuge near
there. Well, he was made head of that, so he left here. But it was such a small town and a
small community, you knew everybody. You knew everybody who came to visit.
MR. KAYE: So it was the Arctic Refuge campaign that kind of galvanized ACS?
MS. WOOD: I remember meeting in the hallway after we had had this testimony and the
ones of us that I mentioned, we said that what we needed to do after hearing those people
say that they didn’t want “outside environmentalists” telling them how to run Alaska,
was that …. We all were card carrying members of the Wilderness Society and the Sierra
Club and the Wildlife Federation. You paid your little dues of five dollars or whatever it
was. Woody and I had been members of the Sierra Club since he was finishing his degree
his Forestry at CAL, because they had those wonderful hut systems that you could use if
you were members, for skiing. Mostly the Sierra Club was an outdoors club. It started in
Yosemite. I remember Dave Brower. We were outside and Brower heard we were there
and he asked us into his office. He said that he wanted to have a hike up in Alaska in
McKinley Park. He wanted it for seventy-five people! Woody and I just said we
couldn’t take seventy-five people. He said, “You don’t know how well organized we do
our trips.” They didn’t even understand the situation. We said that you can’t have
seventy-five. They wanted to know if we’d run it. And we said, “Not with seventy-five
people!” Then, when Celia was in the Wilderness Society, I said that they were sending
up trips of fifteen people. I was guiding them up in the Brooks Range. Their program
was to get more people into the wilderness so they could get more people to speak for it.
I told Celia that I was embarrassed to have that many people up in the Brooks Range. I
said, “I don’t like to come in at Kartobik. The last time in, we had all our camping gear
and they couldn’t put on all of the first freight that they had been waiting for, for food.
That’s too many people to have in the wilderness!” Not only for what it does to the…it
becomes a social occasion, rather that it being the wilderness there and you have
companionship. It isn’t just yack, yack, yack all of the time and you don’t even notice
where you are. The other thing is for a guide, is you get up there and you; Wing Airlines
was running daily flights and we’d go up on that; you had to got to Kartobik and you had
to get Wallady or somebody to fly you back up into the mountains for the trip. You have
to go two by two because usually it was a small plane. You just don’t have big planes.
Then you have your grub. You have to divide up the people and they have never even
been up in there before. Here you are sending them out, two by two, and have to sure
that everybody has tents, food, gas, prime stoves and equipment whether you go with the
first group or not, as they go. Pretty soon, you’ve got more out there than you’ve got
here, but you’ve got to be sure that everyone has what they need. If you can’t do it all in
one day, or it takes two or three days because of weather, then you have people stuck.
And they don’t know that you have to do this. The thing is, if you’re going to have small
group, don’t have too many people. Then you can all do the same thing. That was a
horrible thing. And I told Celia that I didn’t want any more people from the Wilderness
Society. “I am embarrassed to come in with that many people”. The Sierra Club was
having twenty-five people then. I told them that I would meet some, not very often but
once in a while. I would not take that many people on a trip.
It was as much for me, as it was for the wilderness. The main thing was, The Sierra Club,
with seventy-five people? That’s just a convention!
MR. KAYE: I am about out of questions. I just want to ask you if there is anything
you’d like to say about the Arctic Refuge; looking back on the purpose, the value of it, or
anything you’d like to say about it.
MS. WOOD: I spent from 1960 to what it is now, almost 2003. I am still sending letters
and working. When Celia died, that was the last thing we were doing was putting up
tacks to go in. She was on the phone to Debbie Miller asking who the Senators were who
were on the fence. She was taking a list of them. She’d come back and we’d write our
little things. We said that it was getting to be eleven o’clock and we’d go to Sam’s; he’s a
geologist who has his own office and fax machine; we’ll going over in the morning and
send them, why don’t we knock it off and go to bed? So we did. She went downstairs,
and she never came up.
MR. KAYE: That was the last thing that Celia did?
MS. WOOD: That was the last thing. We were up until eleven o’clock at night. The last
person she talked to was Debbie Miller. Debbie had been just back from there. We asked
her “who were the guys who were on the fence?” We never did send them. I was writing
mine, and she was writing hers. She said that she would type mine up and we’d get over
to Sam’s in the morning and use his fax. It was a weekend anyway. The next morning, I
got up; usually she was the first one up. She was always hungry early and wanted to eat.
Sometimes we ate together and sometimes we didn’t. I thought, she’d just been back
from being gone for a month outside. Then she’d come home and gone to one of
Conservation Foundation meetings down in Anchorage. I thought well, I’ll fix her a nice
breakfast and not oatmeal, “I’ll make her an omelet”, because we didn’t do that very
often. I kept pounding on the floor and thought she was probably on the computer and
couldn’t hear me. I went down at about 10 o’clock, and there she was on the floor!
Just looking like she had laid down to sleep! Her face was calm, and she had her clothes
on. She had her [sounds like] bucks eye so she could see out her window at the view.
You had to go down a little ladder. She had gone down that ladder. There was no anguish
or any thing like she has choked on something or had a stroke or anything. It wasn’t as if
she had collapsed. She may have decided to so some meditation. She had on her grubbies,
I don’t know if she slept in them or whether it was a sweat suit. She may have gotten up
to do some exercises. She had mentioned that she was out of shape and that she had
better start doing some exercises. Then, “well, I’m a little tired, I’ll just lie down for a
minute”, or something, I don’t know. Who knows? But what a way to go!?
It was sure a shock! We had been skiing just a couple of days before. We didn’t have
much snow but we could go down to Smith Lake and ski around there, just to ski. I
remember we’d had done that. We had made one trip on our trail up around Les Verrick’s
land and decided that there too.. we said, “Let’s not do this any more.” We agreed that
unless we got more snow, there were too many roots and things sticking up and we’d
better go together. You could trip and fall and break something and be out there. We
always did that individually. But we decided that until we got more snow, we’d plan to
say together.
MR. KAYE: It’s certainly interesting that that is the last thing she worked on.
MS. WOOD: The trip she made outside was sort of a pilgrimage. I thought we were
going to go in the spring, together and do some hiking. I said that maybe we ought to
think about the dates for the spring and she said, “Well, I’ve already made mine, I am
going this fall”. She said she knew just where she was going, and who she was going to
see. She didn’t say anything like, “why don’t you come?” And we couldn’t anyway,
somebody had to close up it was wintertime. You had to get all of the garden stuff in and
your wood chopped. And there is all the stuff you have to put away. Usually winter
comes at the first of October with the snow. After that, it’s going to stay.
MR. KAYE: I am glad I was able to talk to Celia. I wish I would have recorded her about
her thoughts on the Refuge.
MS. WOOD: She would have had…She was top dog and head of a lot of …during the
Nilka, she was on the Land Use Planning Commission for the feds. They sent plane in to
land on Wonder Lake. You don’t land on Wonder Lake. It was a Widgeon, I think. Who
was bringing this in? I found out that it was somebody to come and talk to her. The next
think I knew she had been selected to be one of the members of the Board for the feds.
Before that she had been on the Board of the Wilderness Society and then, Chairman of
the Board. She was with the feds when they were looking at all of the different areas.
She spent the next two summers being mostly gone flying all over. That’s when she was
with Mardy. I was running camp. She’d pop in for two weeks and be off for two weeks,
that got kind of old. We were trying to decide; she’s got so many opportunities, do we
want to run camp any longer? What do we do with this? It was like having a bear by the
tail. If Wally and Jerry hadn’t come along and made the offer, because they had worked
for us and we knew who they were. We knew their ethics. Wally was perfectly capable
of doing it and would do a good job. We would never be ashamed that we sold to him.
Now, boy, has he got something by the tail? That place is worth so many millions of
dollars, no one could afford to but except for maybe Princess Tours. But he would never
sell it to them. Someone would put a hotel there. Then, we kept twelve acres and kept
two cabins so we’d have a place where we could go through the Park. So we’re
landholders, too. And it’s been assessed at half a million dollars just because it’s got a
view of McKinley. At most, it’s twelve acres of permafrost except the one place where
we’ve got the A frame. You are caught with that, and you’re…. Celia willed her part of it
to Romney. Wally almost had it through so we could sell our development rights to the
Park Service. It means that you would never get any bigger. You could repair anything
that needed repairing, but you could never have anything more. The Park Service would
buy it, and we’d get some money and we could still operate it, but under this condition.
Then, that would reduce what it was worth for anybody that wanted to make a million
dollars. And you know who stopped it? Mikowski. Individually. I have talked to
people that were back there with the Department of the Interior. They said Mikowski
was the one. They said he wants to have that opened up to big tourism. And he wants a
road or a railroad into Cantishna. He’s backing that. And he just personally did it to stop
Camp Denali. And of course we wanted to do the same thing. Because Celia Hunter was
one of the owners. That’s really stopped us, because that’s what we’d do. If we could
see that whoever did buy it own it or when we bequeathed it, it never could be anything
more than what it already it except to maintain it. We wouldn’t even give it to the Park
Service because they’d probably put a maintenance station there, a road crew at least,
down at our place and get gravel out of it.
MR. KAYE: Well, I have taken a lot of your time. Is there anything you want to say
finally, about the Refuge?
MS. WOOD: I keep forgetting that I am being recorded for posterity. But as I say, it’s
trying to, as this stage at the end of my life, trying to figure out what I thought about
then. When you are looking at it in retrospect, and you get mixed up with how feel now
and how you felt then.
MS. KAYE: How do you feel now?
MS. WOOD: Well, I’m just glad I was born when I was. Boy, I have… when I see what
happened with the elections, and everybody that got elected. The programs are saying
that we’ve got these vast resources here, we don’t need to have taxes, we don’t need to do
anything but develop them. Mikowski says that we should start with roads. You build
roads into the wild and get all of the land in private ownership so private business can
develop it. You’d think they’d have learned something from Enron and that stuff. Every
day you read the paper and there is somebody exposing these big corporations. His idea
that all you do is get the roads to them and it there. You get more fish and more timber
and more oil. But you’ve got to make access. So you build more roads in the forest and
you make…then you stop and limit any restrictions on private enterprise that’s doing
this. And then, Alaska will be rich, and people will be rich, and we’ll all be prosperous.
We’ll get bigger and bigger with more growth, and more money. That’s his concept. He
went broke running a Bank! Am I still on here? I don’t know what he knows about the
economy!
MR. KAYE: So.,.
MS. WOOD: By the way, have you read…if you want to talk economics…you know,
that’s how we stopped Rampart Dam, based on economics alone. We couldn’t talk about
the ducks. In fact when Celia was in the debate with the guy who was a Senator, he
shook his fist and said that she was talking about ducks and geese and moose, and you’re
not talking about those things, you’re talking about economics! And that’s not your field!
She was proving that it was not economical to dam the Yukon. And that power, by the
time they got it down there, wouldn’t be very cheap! In fact, an economist who was
from Michigan and very well known, did a study on it right after that. That’s what he
stopped it. And we really broadcast that. He said the same thing we were saying, but he
did it as a scientific economist and not as an environmentalist, and that’s what stopped
that.
MR. KAYE: Let me ask a final question. You played important roles in the Refuge
campaign, the Rampart Dam, Project Chariot, I mean your whole Alaskan life, at least in
the last few decades, has been leadership roles in conservation. Why have you spent so
much time and energy?
MS. WOOD: Well we didn’t. If I hadn’t been doing other things, going on tangents, first
flying around the country and then with Camp Denali. Let me just make this statement;
In those days environmental concerns came one at a time, and they were black and white.
If you did a little homework, and you didn’t have to do it very far because you knew
everybody that was connected with it, and was there and saw it and made the decisions.
That was what Alaska was. Now, your issues come multiplied, and they come in many
shades of gray. You don’t always have access to know. You don’t happen to have just
had dinner with the guy that was the key person in that, so it’s become much more
complicated. That’s why the Alaska Conservation Society, in 1980, still had money and
some influence but Bob Wheedon was asked by Hammond to be an advisor. And Celia
had a chance to go back to Washington, D. C. and be head of the Wilderness Society.
There were so few of us left to run it. And it was getting so we realized that you couldn’t
operate out of living rooms. You had to have fax and Xerox machines. You had to have
telephones and an office and people working there. You couldn’t do it on just volunteers.
Before, it was kind of fun. It was kind of like David slaying Goliath. All you had to have
was…then, people could hitchhike to a meeting and make a speech. But it was so easy to
get the facts and know somebody that was there. It was not like it is now. That’s why
we decided to go out of business while we were ahead. We divided up the money that we
had and gave it to the centers that were starting up in Juneau. That was an organization
of a lot of different environmental organizations. That was Seeak. But we started first up
here with Environmental Center, and then Seeak and Anchorage was the last one to come
in, but they have ACE, for the same reasons. So we divided all of the money between
them. And then there were small organizations that were chapters of ours. We started
out just in Fairbanks. They people would write us and say that they had this “little
bonfire” down here, well we felt like they knew more about it than we did, so we told
them to start their own. We had a lot of organizations that are still going as a group,
independently. They aren’t part of the Seeak, but I guess they cooperate with them.
This all started because they were going to log their favorite recreational river that
everybody goes hunting and camping and fishing on. And they said, “Not in our back
yard!” They knew the issues, and we told them to fight, and they did. That’s what
happened with all the others. We never went out trying to start one. They would write
us and ask what we could do about it up there. And we’d tell them just organize like we
did. We became, with all of these satellite ones. But it got too big to handle. And you
have to have all of this money now. And you have to have all of this machinery. And
you have to have all of these people that work, that give their lives to it. You can’t just
operate it as a bunch of volunteers out of living rooms and kitchens. So that’s the
difference. And you ask, “Why did you do it?” It was fun! And it was interesting, and
you met the neatest people.
MR. KAYE: But you’ve continued on, and you’ve done so much more than just about
anyone!
MS. WOOD: I think that maybe I am a “has-been”. Celia loved it. Oh gad, I wanted to
be out skiing, hiking. I wanted to be out smelling the flowers instead of writing about
them. I can’t spell very well. And I purposely haven’t learned how to do a computer. I
don’t want to spend my life down there with email. Regular mail is bad enough. Camp
was part camp, and part…Well you know we had an educational thing going on while you
were out. You were a bird expert! The people that came there. We were asked how we
could stand those tourists. Some of them were a pain in the neck, but very few. I met
some of the my best friends, and people who had that as their field who I could from. I
learned as much from the guests as I taught them. I think it was a joy, just going out and
discovering things together like I did. Discovering and learning new things, and being out
in it! I wanted people to understand…they all thought you had to see a wolf and a bear
and a caribou migration, and then they could go on to the next thing, they had been there,
they’d done it. And if they don’t see it, they thought it wasn’t all what it was cracked up
to be. The thing is, like I used to tell my people who were waiting for the plane to come;
just go out, and sit down and see what you see. Quit pacing around when the plane is
going to come. If you don’t get back to your board meeting, well, you got trapped in the
Arctic! Wouldn’t that make a good story?! The plane didn’t come, and there we were,
abandoned! I have had on my trips wonderful, interesting people. And I have learned as
much as I have probably given. So that’s why I could do it. And what would you be
doing if you weren’t doing that? You’d have to go and get a job. In the War because I had
good eyesight I could qualify to fly all of those fighter planes; if I hadn’t, I would have
been making airplanes like everybody else was. People your age don’t know what a war
is, and we didn’t get bombed. We didn’t have to go down in the tunnels or take our
family down under ground during a bombing raid. But, your father could only get enough
gasoline for his job. And it was rationed. All ski and other resorts were closed. There
wasn’t any pleasure trips. You didn’t drive a car to do that. There was a war on! There
was a lot of things you couldn’t get. I happened to be flying and that was as good a way
as any to spend the War. But here, they just don’t understand. Certain people went off
and got killed or maimed and fought a war, but business was good because they could sell
a lot of things during the war, until after the war, and then you have a depression. The big
Depression was because of World War I. You destroy a lot of things, and you have to
make up for it. People are out of jobs. Then you find out that you’ve got to do
something about the people who got wounded and take care of them. Social services go
up. During the war, there’s jobs because half the people are off fighting it and the others
can get the jobs and get paid. People are selling things. Munitions and manufacturers and
commerce is good. Then you have a depression afterwards. I think people that grew up
since World War II have never known what it is to be rationed. They don’t what it is to
really have somebody that you love get killed. It was just poor people who went off and
fought Viet Nam, mostly. Bush has certainly never experienced that, or he wouldn’t be
so hot to get into another war. I think that that is why people voted the way they did,
because they promised growth and prosperity. If you read Lester Brown’s book
Ecoecomonics. If you go into the economics of this instead of saving the wilderness; and
it’s not that saving the wilderness isn’t important, but I think that now we always talk
about prosperity and improving the standard of living. I think that because there are so
many of us, and resources are diminishing, that we are going to have to shoot for
sustainability. You don’t have to starve to death in the dark to do it. We were just as
happy when were in the cabin that didn’t have anything. We thought it was great. It was
warm, and it was our house! I think that if you don’t get sustainability, the next thing is
going to be survival. That’s not very pretty. It won’t be the big corporations that has
and gets, it’s going to be everybody out for yourself to try and get enough eat and enough
water and enough everything! We don’t have to do that. We can have a good, high
standard of living, a high standard of life and have a very high well being index, which
should be the real judge of your economy, if we start now to shoot for sustainability and
not for prosperity where them that has, gets, and for the others that’s tough. Let them
eat cake! In any case, that’s the way I see it now, and I’m not going to be around to find
out how it all comes out. But I always seemed to be the right age, at the right time, in the
right place. Just the luck of the draw, and I was very very grateful for that. Where I grew
up, I always felt that anybody who didn’t live in a small town or on a farm had a
deprived childhood. Any body who wasn’t free to roam around the woods….I don’t like
rules and regulations either. But as soon as you have growth you have to have them. We
didn’t have a stop sign in Fairbanks when I got here. I could tell if a car was coming, so
could everybody else! We didn’t hit moose, and we didn’t hit each other. Now, we have
stop lights and you have to wait for it to go through all it’s things. It takes me much
longer to get to the airport than it used to! If you didn’t, you’d have nothing but crashes.
I think that we have been too comfortable, it’s been too easy. If you weren’t prosperous,
you could go to drugs and make money there. Or, forget about it all if you were using
them. We’ve got a whole population, which is put too much stock in growth and
prosperity, and profits and fraud. If you can’t make it one way, you’ll make it another.
And I think, even as a child growing up in the Depression, there wasn’t violence. When I
was a kid I could wander all over town and talk to anybody. There have always been
mean people. There have always been robbers. Murder was something that you hardly
ever heard of in your town. We didn’t know what that meant. I think we’ve lost a sense
of integrity and too many people have walked on nothing but sidewalks and cement in
their whole life. Maybe they are good people. And they think they are comfortable in
their condominium and their job, but they have never know what it is to walk on earth.
And they never notice things like that. Even driving a car. It’s all road rage now. You do
the flying by push buttons. You have to notice what’s under you! Like you and I
learned! You have to navigate on the ground and be conscious of where you are and
where you’d put it if that engine quit! Now, they don’t, they just dial where their
destination is and doing pay any attention.
MR. KAYE: Well, our tape is almost done.
MS. WOOD: Well good.
MR. KAYE: I want to thank you.
MS. WOOD: And that’s the end of that speech and I’ll get back to sorting my stuff.

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INTERVIEW WITH GINNY WOOD
BY ROGER KAYE NOVEMBER 10, 2002
MR. KAYE: This is an oral history interview with Virginia Hill Wood. It is being
conducted in her home in College, Alaska on November 10, 2002 by Roger Kaye. The
subject of this interview today is Ginny and Celia’s role in, and remembrances about
establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So Ginny tell me just briefly about
when you first heard about the effort to establish what is now the Arctic Refuge as a
wilderness.
MS. WOOD: I don’t know whether we heard it from George Collins and Lowell Sumner
who were our contacts. We kept running into them. Of course, Lowell has a little
airplane, and we had a little plane. They were parked together down on the park strip
when he was up here. It may have been the Muries. We knew Olaus because he’d come
up and visit his brother. But before we ever met Mardy, or ever was introduced to their
concept of saving the Refuge, we had [Abe?] Murie. I don’t know, have you read that
new book that’s just come out Changing Tracks?
MR. KAYE: Yes.
MS. WOOD: That’s interesting. The concept of wilderness, when it changed from being
some place where it’s just wild; the European concept, it’s just a desolate place, to this is
a ‘what it incorporates and what it meant’ is something that gradually came. I realized
that I probably had it as a little kid. I liked to be where there weren’t a lot of people. But
I never, was aware of the concept of wilderness. When we were asked to go and testify,
then whatever I said, that’s what I was thinking at the time.
MR. KAYE: So how did you become involved, yourself, in the campaign?
MS. WOOD: Well really what happened is that after these assorted people including
Bob Weedon who was just working for Fish and Wildlife then I think, and had been up
here doing his thesis for his Doctorate; and Fred and Dave Kline who was a graduate
student then, we were asked because we were neighbors of Fred’s. They asked us to
come on over. They wanted some people there who could get out and testify. So then, I
had some concept of wilderness by just being a bush pilot and flying over all of this
vastness. I was beginning to get a concept that wilderness is someplace that hasn’t been
cluttered up with people. Woody and I started changing our minds; we wanted a camp
where people came and went out in it and got a concept and weren’t out fighting the
wilderness. But what Bartlett, who was, it was right after Statehood….but what I
wanted to mention was that we were out in the hall afterwards, after we had been asked
to say something. We heard over and over from the other people who came; the miners
and businessmen. The theme of their talks was that they didn’t want outside
environmental organizations telling us how to run Alaska. The Sierra Club, the
Wilderness Society and the Wildlife Federation were the ones that they mostly knew
about. I don’t know who idea it was, Bob Wheedon or Fred’s or who, but they said
‘why don’t we start’ the only conservation movement then was more or less like what
the Outdoor Council has. There was a guy named Bud Boddie down in Juneau who was
well known. But he was beginning to get a little worried about timber cutting where it
would bother the fishing, or maybe over-shooting game. But wilderness was not a…but
they didn’t like any of those organizations. What Woody and I had been members of the
Sierra Club mainly because we liked to go skiing up at the lodges that they had. It was
more of an outing club when we first joined it. We got their literature. That’s where we
decided to form an organization that you have to be eligible to vote, and had voted in
either the Territory of Alaska or the new State of Alaska in order to be a voting member.
You could contribute some money if you wanted to, but to be able to vote, they wanted
members to be able to say they were Alaskans and we vote here. This represents our
feelings, and it’s our land. I think that’s when we decided that we couldn’t depend on of
the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, it had to come from inside.
MR. KAYE: So that was the Alaska Conservation Society?
MS. WOOD: Yes, and fortunately all of these people were Biologists. We had the, when
we went to testify on things after that, the first thing was to establish the Arctic National
Wildlife Range. I think that whether we’d met Collins and Lowell and the Muries, where
they came in I don’t remember, somewhere along there in the background too that we met
just because we were down at the camp at McKinley Park, and they all came through.
We always just ran into them. Lowell, when we met, we always talked about airplanes
with. It was he and George that went up and took some of those early rafting trips down
those rivers and they didn’t know anything about that in those days! It happened that
most of the membership and most of the board members were people like Fred, Bob
Wheedon, a guy down in Juneau, I can’t think of his name now; he established the whole
conservation [department] at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He was a giant
in the early days, and he was on the board. We’d go to hearings, and because we’d
always run our testimony through one of these guys to be sure we had the facts right. We
could go to hearings and the reaction would be, “Where did these people come from?
How do they know that?” When everybody else was going on just absolute greed and
were absolutely illiterate as far as ecology was concerned. I don’t know when the term
‘ecology’ came into my vocabulary. It was somewhere along the way, probably from
reading Aldo Leopold.
MR. KAYE: And you discovered Leopold when you or Woody worked for Denali Park?
MS. WOOD: They had a very limited library there and they had an old copy of it. I read
it and was very impressed. Before that I had read a lot of Indian lore as a youth and
Thoreau I had read and loved. Then I was weathered in in Galena for seventeen days and
we were staying at somebody’s house there. It was the CAA house because they were
out and they wanted somebody to keep the water running in there and flush the toilets so
it wouldn’t freeze. I was in there and that’s where I first read Bob Marshall’s work. The
first was his book on Arctic Village. But then, there was another one that he wrote later
that told of his travels. That really sparked my interest in wild Alaska. And just flying
over it. And just the vastness of it. It’s different from when you are flying over the
States. I was ferrying planes during the War. There was always a field you could…
MR. KAYE: What is it about Marshall’s writings that touched you?
MS. WOOD: Just his zest for seeing what was over the next ridge, which was mine as a
kid.
MR. KAYE: Was it that sense of horizons unexplored and discovery?
MS. WOOD: Yeah, and he was a good writer. And as I said my early thing was a zest
for adventure and seeing what’s over the hill. I always did, and still do camp when I
could get time off. I explored. I have been to the head of every river down there.
Sometimes I was by myself or with one of the staff. I just wanted to see. I was curious.
Then you begin to, when we were in camp, we began to feel…first you have to deal with
nature as sort of an adversary. The bridges will wash out, and so you have to wade the
rivers. You don’t close up in time and the big snow comes and you’re stuck out there,
and can’t get over the road. People ask me what was my vision in camp. We didn’t have
any vision. We just wanted to spend the summer there, and Woody wanted to finish
climbing Mount McKinley, which he did. He was with the group that made the first
traverse of the mountain. He had this childhood of just exploring the woods of Maine
until he found Colorado. Then, he was doing it in the Army. Then is was his solace,
hiking in the …. I know that mostly, in camp we used to think that we needed to develop
McKinley Park because there was no facilities for people. There wasn’t anything. Then
we began to ask if we really wanted to do that. It began changing. We had opportunities,
and we couldn’t start a camp with no money. We tried to borrow some at the Bank and
they said, ‘that’s not worth anything’, we couldn’t borrow anything on it. And that was
good because we never had to pay back anybody. We always paid our bills in October
from what we charged during the summer. But I think the concept that, ‘Wait a minute,
this is a place where you can make a headquarters and stay and get immersed in what’s
out there’ we decided not to have a TV, not to had a bar. This was not because we were
teetotalers, but mainly because we didn’t want to see beer cans all the way back along the
highway. Nature was telling us what we were doing wrong. I always remember Conrad’s
writings of the sea saying that the sea is not for you or against you it’s just very
unforgiving of errors. That’s what flying is in the north, and that’s what mountain
climbing it. I had done a lot of mountain climbing and skiing in the northwest. Whether
you are climbing a mountain like Rainer or Baker, or skiing then was going cross-country
on your skis to the highest mountain you could find to ski down on. But it was getting
away from tows and from where everybody else was skiing. We didn’t say, “Oh, I want
to go out in the wilderness”.
MR. KAYE: How about the idealism? I am reading the Conservation Review that you
edited here for ACS. You are always quoting Leopold and Marshall here, particularly
Leopold. When did you first discover him?
MS. WOOD: It was that first year when Woody and I were down at McKinley in the
Library. There was no road. All we had was the plane to get out of there. There was no
road that came into McKinley so you were pretty much…and somebody left us a copy
there. I still have it. I took it!
MR. KAYE: You once told that you had Aldo Leopold’s Sancony Almanac on your
bedstand through the Arctic Refuge campaign.
MS. WOOD: Yeah.
MR. KAYE: That must have influenced the way you thought about that place.
MS. WOOD: Well, he was as you know was marvelous writer. He had a way of saying
things. He just had a way with words. I could have read the same thing and it could have
been deadly dull. But his writings, and I keep reading it over and over. I think everybody
should read it once a year, just to … You find new meanings and new expressions. Just in
one paragraph he can say something so succinctly. There again, his wilderness was a little
farm up in Wisconsin, except when he was first working for the Forest Service.
Everybody remembers that story about when he stopped being a wolf hunter. That
dying wolf, the last green light in that wolf’s eye. But then he became an ecologist.
Shooting wolves meant that there was going to be an overproduction of deer. My
concepts of that started then. Being able to use words so beautifully to describe
something. He had such a down to earth, hands on concept. And where he got his
concepts of ecosystems and how that works, and controls and so forth. So that was my
beginning of some formal biology. When you first came up in the wintertime, you went
to courses at the University, everybody did. The average age there was forty. They were
waiting for jobs to open up in the summer. I took a course in ecology. Odom was the
textbook. The guy was not a very good lecturer, but he did expose me to the learned part
of biology and ecology. Odom’s textbook was excellent on that. I still have it. Just the
fundamentals of looking at how everything is connected to everything else and the
fundamentals of ecology. I really, that took everything of others that had just been
philosophical and put it in a background of. .. since then I have collected and I have a big
library.
MR. KAYE: I’ve got a copy here of your testimony in 1959 before the Senate Sub-
Committee that held hearings here in Alaska on the proposal to establish the Arctic
Refuge. You make the statement, “Wilderness is of the highest importance to science as a
standard for reference. It is a laboratory where biologists of today and the future can
study to find answers to the reoccurring question, what was the natural order before man
changed it?” Did you get those ideas from Leopold and your Ecology classes?
MS. WOOD: I can’t tell you now. But I did…I forget when Alaska was a Territory and
when it was a State. Yes, I had taken that class by then. We established the
Conservation society and I told you why. All of the guys that were in it were biologists
or botanists. I was one of the few people involved that didn’t have a formal degree in it.
We had been exposed to it.
MR. KAYE: So, you thought that this was an important purpose of setting the Arctic
Refuge aside?
MS. WOOD: Yeah! And I suppose that what I was thinking then, I must have
expressed better than I could now. You can read that, instead of listening to me!
MR. KAYE: At that time, did you plan on going up and actually experiencing the Arctic
Refuge? Or, were you motivated perhaps more for other reasons?
MS. WOOD: At that time, except, and I quit flying commercially then because my
daughter was born in 1956. You can’t be weathered in in a place when you’re nursing a
kid! Woody had a commercial license too, but he didn’t do it much. We had a plane at
camp. We couldn’t have built a camp without a plane. There was no road connecting the
McKinley Park to it. But I think that probably operating Camp Denali when we were
trying to working…for instance the first thing we did was to go up and drag some logs
down to use for foundations for our tent cabins with old military Jeep which was the
only car we owned then, up over the tundra. And what did that do but go down to the
mineral soil? And the next thing we knew we had a creek coming down through camp.
You don’t do that. Then, just that we didn’t sell beer at camp. We could have made a lot.
We needed money badly, but then we’d see all of those tin cans all the way back to…then
our feeling more and more was that what we were doing, like our experience in Europe,
giving people a place to stay and not just come one night. They could stay and get
immersed in nature. Finally, the first thing I did when everybody came was I took them
on a hike to what I called the “clover ponds”, where they spent the day just going from
pond to pond and seeing what was in them. It’s not a hard hike, and you are walking on
tundra. You point out things like, “where you are walking, that’s one of our willows”.
Then you get, without making it a formal thing, because I didn’t have a degree in it, but
what happened was be sure you know what you’re talking about if you make a
statement. Because you may have somebody that is the head of a department, or has his
Ph. D., or wrote a book on that subject. People that came to camp, they were the ones
that taught me. This was what they did. They enjoyed being in a place like that, but
they knew ecology. They were birders. They were people [knowledgeable]. I learned an
awful lot from the people that came there who had degrees, when I started thinking about
the science of wilderness.
MR. KAYE: So your motivation for getting involved in the refuge campaign, was it
because you wanted to go there and experience it as wilderness, or were there other
[reasons]?
MS. WOOD: I guess I didn’t think about that. Because when I had done my flying when
I first came up here, that’s how I made a living was flying charter. It was mostly up to
Nome and Kotzebue and we’d get weathered in in little native villages. You should know
about that. It was just flying over this country and just looking at it. Before I came to
Alaska right after I got out of the War and even during the War when I was ferrying
planes, everybody else was going where there were fields to land in. I was exploring. I
can remember flying P-51’s and P-38’s that had never been in the air before and taking
them over the Sierras, even in the desert and over the Red Rock country in New Mexico
on the way to Newark, New Jersey to deliver the planes. I was always looking down to
find places that I’d want to go hiking when the War was over. I did go back and find
some of those very places I looked down at.
MR. KAYE: In the mid 1950’s when you got involved, what was it, that you thought
you’d go to this place and have fun there? Or was it something broader?
MS. WOOD: We started camp in 1952. We staked it out in 1951. The summer before
that I was down in Katmi. I had flown for Wing Airlines and some local people charter. I
had taken stuff out to Nome and Kotzebue. I had looked down on a lot of wilderness and
I thought that it would be fun to, you know, paddle that river. It was the concept of
being on the ground and exploring that, that would entertain me. Besides, it was a good
way to remember landmarks. In seat of your pants flying, you pay attention to the
ground. They don’t anymore, they just dial it. I think it was like sight seeing from the
air. And even when I was down in the southwest, I was always looking. And I was
always saying how that would be fun to explore on foot. I often deviated from the course
I was supposed to be on because I wanted to see over the next hill or look at those
interesting rocks. I guess it was, as I said, a sense of curiosity and adventure, and just
wanted to see what it looked like from the ground to feel it and to smell it.
MR. KAYE: At this time in the 1950s and you are working with ACS did you plan to
actually go there necessarily?
MS. WOOD: No, I didn’t see how there would be any opportunity because you
wouldn’t want to go there in the wintertime. I mean, I didn’t hanker to be the first one
there, or on a dog team trip. No, it was the concept of having someplace that maybe
some day…. But it wasn’t one of those places that I had seen from the air and wanted to
get on the ground. I was busy in McKinley Park exploring. There was just nobody else
in the Park but us. And I never ran into anyone else.
MR. KAYE: So tell me about the concept that appealed to you, of protecting this place.
Was it just knowing that it would be there?
MS. WOOD: I think at that time, it was the fact that I was beginning to get, without
expressing it orally, the we were getting too clever, but weren’t very smart. We don’t
have wisdom, but we are very clever, and so our technology is running ahead of us. I
think Mardy, maybe I read it out of her book, but she said that her reason was for some
place where you leave nature alone and it is devoid of technology. After World War II we
began to have all of these mechanical things. Too many people were getting too rich and
using technology to either develop resources or for pleasure. You need some places that
nobody has done anything to. Then, I was beginning to read and take courses in ecology
and the concept of it. I don’t know which came first. But the idea that if for nothing else,
how are you going to know how to fix something if you don’t know what it was like
originally and what nature is doing? There is that concept that nature has it’s own
economy. It’s the economy of nature. Sure, it’s tooth and claw but it has its rhythms.
We go in and try to fix it, we build roads and people come and throw their garbage around.
So pretty soon you’ll never know what your baseline was, what it was like. Then of
course, that was the whole thing with Project Chariot. That became one of the first things
we took up when we organized. That was they wanted to put this nuclear explosion up
to show that they could use it for peaceful uses. The idea that using a nuclear bomb for
peaceful uses, well, that wasn’t what the military wanted. They just wanted to get a
bigger explosion that people weren’t complaining about like they were in Nevada. They
said that that was their idea. Well this is wilderness, and it won’t hurt anybody so we
can make them as big as well can to see what happens. Then when they came up to sell it
to the University, so they would back it, of course the University did but not people that
worked on it. Then of course a lot of my friends, the biologists that were working out
there said, “Wait a minute, you’ve picked this place which is very biologically rich. You
picked it because you thought it was remote and desolate and wouldn’t anybody.’
People live off of the resources here. And the winds keep the ridges swept so the
Caribou are wintering there. The ocean currents are such there that make them very rich
biologically. When they picked it, they didn’t see that. They just went to a map and felt
like this was far away from anybody that would complain about it, and there’s nothing
there. “We’ll advertise it, and if we make a harbor there they can use it for the vast
commerce with the orient.’ They said there were vast resources that could be developed.
There wasn’t anything. Because all of my friends were biologists, and in all fields, were
working up there from anthropology to biology, even the geologists said this was crazy.
We were getting information from all of them and sending it right directly back to the
Department of the Interior.
MR. KAYE: Reading through the Alaska Conservation Society news bulletin that you
edited, and in some of the things you told me before, it seems like much of the effort that
you guys expended was kind of a response or a reaction against the post-World War II
economic and technological boom that we saw. Is that true, do you think?
MS. WOOD: Well, I can’t speak for everybody. Bob Wheedon saw, as a biologist, what
Fred Dean saw. Some of the others, this was their field of study. For those that went
out there like Les Verick, he thought it was neat just to be able to go out there. And Bill
Pruitt too. They were all close friends and neighbors. Each of them would sit and talk
about it, and I suppose I was collecting information from them. I was the editor and
sometimes I was the editor because with everybody else, they were biologists and they
would have lost their jobs if they had…. Like Bob Wheedon. I was never the writer that
Bob was. He was a giant both philosophically and in what he wrote and as a person. He
was probably an Aldo Leopold in his own right. But he had a Ph. D. and he could write
papers. I remember that I was President for a time because we couldn’t find anybody
else who wouldn’t lose their job until they got Dr. Wood. Then, Dr. Wood was one of
the promoters of Project Chariot and he was firing people who weren’t… you know that
history. Fred Dean said, “Let him do it, he can’t shut us up if he’s going to do all of
that!” When he was through at the University, he ran to be head of the Borough. He was
thick into political things. We felt like he couldn’t say anything about us if this was what
he was doing as President.
MR. KAYE: As far as the Arctic Refuge campaign, do you think that, as well, was kind
of a reaction against what people saw happening in the 1950’s and not wanting it to
happen up there?
MS. WOOD: I can’t speak for anybody else, but if you read what they said, then you
got probably what they were thinking at that time. What you think of know, is what you
think you thought then, at my age. It was a learning experience. Alaska is like a small
town on a party-line. It’s very hard for somebody to hide their dirty linen. You get
involved in things that you wouldn’t do outside. If I was in Seattle or New York I would
be going skiing and liking the mountain and going and doing it and exploring to see what
was over the hills but it wouldn’t have been done as an environmentalist. I think that up
here my best friends and neighbors were the leaders in the biology and conservation
[movements]. I took Fred Dean’s course in Resource Use. We were just beginning to
realize that there was over-use. He said that when we’ve used up all of the land there was
always the sea. That would be the last place that we would have, so we’d better not
muck it up. The big thing now, that we are running on worldwide, even the National
Geographic which never used to touch things like this, is water just to grow crops and
drink.
MR. KAYE: In your testimony at the Senate Sub-Committee hearing that you attended
here you told the Committee “that it’s a psychological lift that the visitor gets just
knowing that beyond that ridge, across that valley, behind the mountain, there are no
roads, power lines or people, just virgin country”. What does that express about how
you felt at the time about the special kind of wilderness experience that people ought to
be able to have in what is now the Arctic Refuge?
MS. WOOD: As you were saying that, the episode comes to mind. We visited Les and
Terry Verick when he was working on his Ph.D. at Colorado. They were taking care of a
Science Camp, which was up in the mountains. We were outside to pick up a car for
camp. We went on a ski trip where you climbed the ridges in the Rockies. I had never
been in the Rockies before. It was an all day trip. We spent the day climbing up and had
a run back down. We finally got up, after all day climbing on skis up threw and above the
timberline. We got up to the crest of the mountains, and looked down, and there was a
highway. It struck me that we had spent all day, to see what’s on the other side of this
ridge. And when we get over there, there’s a major highway with cars going up and down.
Still, where we were was great. It was wilderness. And I thought when I do that in
Alaska, in McKinley Park you look down and see more and more…you never see any
man made thing. Where I may have read Leopold and Thoreau and all of these people
who had conveyed that we needed someplace more or less that man hasn’t changed. You
are meeting nature on it’s own terms, whether as a scientist or just as a sightseer.
MR. KAYE: In your testimony you mention “nameless peaks”. Mardy Murie and
others talked about namelessness and not naming features. Do you think that is
important for a place like Arctic Refuge? In several of your writings you mentioned that
namelessness was an aspect of this place.
MS. WOOD: Yeah, because what happens when the USGS names them, or when we
people name them, it’s usually named after some political person or somebody’s aunt or
uncle. It’s just putting man…I am not a religious person in terms of a… I might be
spiritual, but not any the form of any one religion. Going around and putting man’s
names on it because it was a political guy like when they tried to change the name of
Denali for a while. Naming things after a politician or somebody’s girlfriend or wife or
husband who had died [is silly]. One place in McKinley Park they named after a pilot
who crashed and killed himself when he was doing something that was a damned fool
thing in the first place. He gets a place named after him. That was Scott Peak. It had just
had a number before. I think that the thing about it now, as I realize after being in the
Arctic a lot, and exploring some of the rivers on foot, I can’t pronounce them and I never
learned to because they are Eskimo names. I can’t tell anybody where I was because I
can’t pronounce it and I didn’t even learn to pronounce it. I say, “Go find it yourself”. If
you are going to name something give it the native name because it was their map, it told
you what it was. “ This is the place that meets the other. The rivers meet here, and
there’s a lot of fish there.” That’s what the name means. There is a roadmap in their
names for things. It’s their guidepost. It tells you what it is as you probably well know.
So, if you’re going to name something, find out what the native name is first.
MR. KAYE: But what’s lost to a name when you do name a feature after a …?
MS. WOOD: Well, if it already has one, and there is a reason why they had it… do it,
instead of naming it after somebody that was never there, or for a political reason, or for
your wife or girlfriend or some other reason. I think that naming it is…but you can’t say
that you don’t want it to have a name because it’s pretty hard to navigate. It’s like trying
to explain how to get to somebody’s house if you don’t have a street number or name.
It’d be nice if it were like it was when I first got here. None of the streets were named.
Mardy, when she was flying over a river in Katmi, asked the pilot what river it was, and
he said he didn’t think it had a name. He passed a note back. She quoted a poem by
Robert Service who was a pilot.
MR. KAYE: He was in the Arctic.
MS. WOOD: I think that particular time she was in Katmi. And I know the river
because I have been over it myself. She was up here when they were doing the
[unintelligible] days when they were flying. Celia was doing the same thing. She and
Celia were in the same plane crash with Abe Thayer [?] But I don’t think any of them
ever flew down there. I think it was one of the local pilots.
MR. KAYE: What did she or you think is lost to a name when you do start naming
features after folks?
MS. WOOD: Well, the name usually doesn’t have anything to do with anybody that was
even there or saw it. I think that it’s an ego thing, or a political thing.
MR. KAYE: Do you think that an ego-centered action is inappropriate in a place like
that?
MS. WOOD: I remember when the boys made the traverse of Mount McKinley and
then said that this was probably, and getting to the top wasn’t even their aim, they just
wanted to get to the head of the Ruth Glacier and explore all of that country behind there
that nobody’s even been in, just to see what was on the other side. And incidentally,
they climbed to the top. Elton made the comment, I found it in a letter he had written to
his wife when he was planning it, that this was probably the first expedition no one will
ever hear about, that’s how much they cared about publicity. Of course, he was killed on
the summit and had a lot of publicity. That’s why I never told anybody up in the Arctic
when I was guiding. Ramon and I did a lot of exploring, mostly for places to take people.
But we never… a lot of those that do have Eskimo names are very hard to pronounce.
We purposely didn’t learn them. Somebody else would take their people there. And the
other thing was, somebody would come back and say that they had been to the
headwaters of such and such and did this and this, and this and saw saw this and this, and
this. I used to say that why I liked exploring the tundra was because there wasn’t any
trails except for an animal one, and they go across the water. You can’t wade like they
can. Every time you take a step you are there. It isn’t a destination. It isn’t like when
you hiking in the States. You go five miles to Lost Lake. In your mind, yes, you notice
things along the way and you know it’s a good hike, but you’re not there until you get to
the sign that says where you were going. But in McKinley Park, or in the Arctic people
ask “Well, where are we going to camp?” And I tell them, “Well, I don’t know. When we
find a good place, and we’re tired.” The concept that we have to get “there”, or “we
haven’t arrived”, is bad. For instance, we had people when we rafted the Hula-Hula and
you take out on a bench down, of course somebody and land, and it always changes
because the river takes out where you can land. It isn’t too far from Barter Island, and
they come in and get you. So you wait there, and isn’t very far away. It’s probably a
half an hour’s flight. But then you’re waiting. And it’s always funny, because when
they first land up at the headwaters out in the Brooks Range they say, “Oh, I could stay
here forever! I don’t care if I never leave!” These are business men and as soon as you
get back and you’re there, then they want to know when the plane is coming because they
have to get back to a board meeting, or they have to do this, or, their wife is having a baby
or something. They’ll pace, wondering why the pilot wasn’t there. I said, “probably
because he’d busy somewhere else”. Or else you could look at the weather and say, “I
wouldn’t want to go back with him, even if he came.” It’s bad weather. I remember doing
this with guys who were from the Wilderness Society; it was a nice sunny day, but they
just hadn’t gotten “there”, and I said, “Listen, instead of just pacing and asking me every
ten minutes what will we do if they don’t come, just look at your watch and go for
twenty minutes in any direction. Then, sit down and stay for twenty minutes. Then
come back and tell me what you saw.” Then they would come back and say, “I know
what you mean”.
MR. KAYE: Mardy Murie talked about not naming places and wilderness more or less
as a gesture of respect for the place.
MS. WOOD: That would be another way of saying it, like Mardy would. She is much
more eloquent than when I said it.
MR. KAYE: Do you agree with that?
MS. WOOD: Oh yeah. It’s very hard. Fairbanks didn’t have any house numbers or
street names when I first got here. You knew where the people lived. They lived next to
the brown house, just past the white house. Now, those houses aren’t even there
anymore. I go to Fairbanks, I can’t find anything because I don’t know the street
numbers. I find them by the buildings. If they took down the purple house, I’ve lost
myself. I think that it would be silly to say, “I don’t want any name”, but I think that
being able to have natural features, and if you give them names, see if there isn’t a native
name for it because that will tell you what it is. It told them. It told you, ‘that’s the
place where the fish come’, or ‘this is the place that runs into that’, or ‘this is the place
where the biggest trees are’. That’s what the names says. That’s a map. That’s a guide,
and that fine. But just naming it after people as a political thing, or somebody you don’t
know that’s never been there, that is. But there can be certain times when giving it a name
after somebody who had, some particular reason, it was part of the story. If it’s part of
the story and somebody was there, first person; or you can’t just say, ‘I can’t tell you
where it is because it doesn’t have a name’, that’s gets a little bit beyond. Because
everybody did give it names, the natives did, but it tells a story, and what was there. It
was the natural features. It was like you describing a ridge beyond the next one that’s
higher than the one before, or something like that. When you stop to think about it, I can
see everybody’s concept. But my concept is when I am taking people on hikes in the
wilderness, is this, you don’t know where we’re supposed to get to because you haven’t
been there before. Or, well, shall we sit down here and have lunch and then we’re there?
Then you can look around and enjoy it!
MR. KAYE: Another word, or concept that I see repeating in your testimony and in
your writings is “wildness”. You use the word, “wild” country, “wildness”. What’s the
essence of wildness? What is the significance of this place, not only scenic and has
animals, but it’s wild?
MS. WOOD: Well, you could do use wild in lots of different concepts as far as the
dictionary goes. But I think in wildness, when you’re thinking about the wilderness is a
concept of the lack of technological manipulation by man. Wildness gets changed. The
[unintelligible] surges can completely change the scenery in a very short period of time,
from something that you could hardly see to something that was almost up to the road.
Landslides blocked the Stony River and we had a three-quarter mile lake there for a long
time. It was super saturated and from a lot of rain, and there might have been a little
earthquake that disturbed it. Then when things are in the permafrost…. [neighbors
approach, tape stops]
…it’s meaning something that is hard to describe. Because it means that if you did it, and
they say “Now, tell me what you mean by that”. That gets to a place where each one has
something that you can’t put into words. It’s a feeling. Everybody’s feelings are a little
different, maybe. Wildness is something to me, that hasn’t been manipulated by man or
any machines. It’s like trying to describe to a guy that wants to climb a mountain on a
snow machine why there’s a difference between going there on skis or snowshoes or foot
and going on a machine. He can’t understand what you’re talking about because he’d
trying to see what he can make his machine do. Then, he wants to know, “Why do you
do it?” First, it’s a matter of tranquility, sanctuary and what your body can do, the
challenge. It isn’t to try to compete, change, or conquer. They use the word “conquer” in
mountaineering. Most mountain climbers will say, “The mountain yielded”. There’s a
difference.
MR. KAYE: For a place like the Arctic, when we see that word wildness used by you
and others, is it just knowing that the place isn’t changed or altered even though you
wouldn’t see an alteration, but just knowing that it’s unaltered that’s important?
MS. WOOD: I think the concept is, and we didn’t realize it when we came up here, it
was an adventure, but then you begin to see what has happened by altering things. And
reflecting back you realize that this wasn’t the way it was when you first got here. You
get to thinking, “How am I affecting…?”
MR. KAYE: I’d like to go on and talk about some of the people you got to know and
work with. You got to know many of the people that were instrumental in establishing
this place and stayed here in your house where we are know. Tell me about Lowell
Sumner. What’s your impression of him? I know what he did.
MS. WOOD: He was a big kid! And they had a very good relationship with Collins. He
called him “Doc” because he had a Ph. D., and I don’t think Collins ever had one. But he
was a kid. He was very funny. Aiden Murie had no use for airplanes. He didn’t like
them. He liked us, but he had to forgive us our sins. I told him that it was another way
of being in another realm of wilderness up in the clouds and the weather. I agreed with
him in that I would use a plane to find out where I wanted to go on the ground. But
people in the Park Service didn’t have planes except Lowell. And he had this old
Luscome which always…I can remember him more than anything else with wrench
working under the hood trying to find out what was wrong with it. Luscome’s didn’t
have too high a grade compared to the Piper Cub and the like. But he loved that plane.
MR. KAYE: What about his ideas? He was considered a visionary in the Park Service.
MS. WOOD: I really don’t know as when we talked about Lowell. At one time he was
married to a woman who we knew, but they divorced. I think that she didn’t think much
of him as a husband. I liked Lowell for what he was as a person. I don’t think we ever
discussed things like…he was always working on his airplane.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about George Collins. He always referred to you and Celia as “the
girls” when I interviewed him.
MS. WOOD: Because he was a lot older! As I said, Woody and I met him first when
they came in to Katmi and he wanted to get down to the lake. We took him down in the
motor boat. Then Celia met him when she was running the roadhouse for Wayne over in
Kotzebue. He was staying there. He was the one who told her the it would be nice if
there was someplace in McKinley Park except that “damned big hotel”. He said that all
the Park Service thinks about is getting up another big hotel. He felt that there should be
some place where people could stay out in the wilderness longer, not for just a one- night-stand.
Of course then, the concept for hotels in National Parks was to have a band, and
tennis courts and a golf course to entertain you while you were there. It was sort of the
European idea of the Spa. He didn’t think that, but at the same time he felt that there
should be facilities, mainly so that people would stay in one spot, and then explore it on
foot. And take it as it comes, you know, the weather and whatever. That resonated with
us, and he talked to Celia about that. When she came back, and we when out with her to
look for a place where Wing Airlines could have for people to stay overnight so that
people could stay in the place. The resonated with Woody and Celia and I because we
had all done it in Europe and found out that Europeans did that. It wasn’t for wilderness,
it was because you stayed in one spot because nature predominated, not in our concept of
wilderness but you are in the mountains. You go walking and you touch it and you feel it
and you smell it and you hear it. And not as a scientist, it was just something that you
grew up doing. Up until World War II, they didn’t have cars. You took a train or a bus
with your family, and you stayed in a little inn. They didn’t have the concept of tents so
much. They had hut systems, and they didn’t want tents because they didn’t want
people camping all over and leaving their garbage. This was in places like Switzerland and
Austria. You walked, and you stayed in the huts. These were sometimes nothing but a
great big bench with straw in it and everybody just slept in their sleeping bags. They
were not fancy places. And there were the fancy places too. But even then, it was
customary to either be skiing or walking.
MR. KAYE: One of George’s concerns was that if this Arctic Refuge became…
MS. WOOD: Has he died now?
MR. KAYE: Yes, he died two years ago now.
MS. WOOD: That’s right, you told me that. He was way in his nineties and he was still
writing to us.
MR. KAYE: I think he was ninety-four. He had reservations about it becoming a Park
because he was afraid of Mission 66.
MS. WOOD: I remember that. All of us were discussing about what the Refuge should
be. And Fred could tell you this. So could Bob Wheedon and all of us discussed this.
We probably talked it over with him too, but I don’t remember the conversation. I just
remember one of the questions was “who should manage it?’ And we were very afraid of
a National Park, because if it were, everybody would go there, and you’d have to have a
big hotel and concessionary. Then there was the issue of the BLM. That would have
been the best because they didn’t do that. One branch of them was in the business of
disposing of land and that’s what they did. They sold land. So it came down to the Fish
and Wildlife Service. The essence of that was not wilderness as far as geography was
concerned as much as it was for the wildlife. I think it was Olaus Murie and Sig Olsen,
whom we knew very well. He stayed at the camp. And Sig in the Wilderness Society
and was on the board when she was Chairman of the Board. I knew him well at camp by
just talking to him. His concept of wilderness was lakes and wildness. But the feeling
was that it losses what you set it aside for, if it becomes just destination for everybody to
go to. That’s when we could see, and Woody and I first thought “Well, gee, there’s
nothing here for anybody here in the Park, except for the little bus trip out to Pinecone
Pass.” There was a hotel from which you couldn’t even see the mountain, and it wasn’t
even part of the Park. It isn’t tundra. The concept that Switzerland has, to keep it’s
wildness is that people stay in huts, and you don’t let them camp. You don’t have any
control over the garbage and having it cluttered up with campers in a little country like
that, so they have to stay in the huts.
MR. KAYE: What else do you remember about George? What impressions did you get
of Collins and his proposal for a last great wilderness?
MS. WOOD: He knew George. We used to tease him in California, when we lived in
Mill Valley. He was quite a raconteur and hilariously funny. He had a sense of humor
that wouldn’t stop. When we first knew him, he was just that guy that worked for the
Park Service that we were supposed to take in the motorboat to show him Katmi. He
was sort of a Government Official. Celia got more chatty with him when he stayed over.
When he stayed in Katmi, he stayed over at the Fish and Wildlife place. By trail it was
about two miles from where Woody and I were in a tent. I can remember visiting him and
I never laughed so much in my life! When you say him and his neighbors coming in to
chat, and he had just has a serious operation for cancer in his throat. He pulled through it
and they were coming to see him. I just remember him as absolutely hilarious. It was like
that. I never laughed so much in my life, when he was with his friends telling stories. It
wasn’t always about wilderness. There were also letters that he wrote to us. Actually
Celia probably knew him better because that was when she was high up in the Wilderness
Society. She saw him when he was talking about these issues. When Woody and I knew
him it was just like meeting somebody and have an interesting conversation with them.
MR. KAYE: How about Sigred Olsen? He played a role in establishing the Refuge.
MS. WOOD: Sig’s son was one of our first board members of the Conservation Society.
Sig., Jr. But he was stationed in Juneau and I didn’t get to know him like I knew Bob
Wheedon and the people who lived up here. Sig was… I remember us sitting down in the
sun under the windows of the lodge discussing more philosophical things. I really can’t
remember any one thing that he said. But I do remember that he was rather wise. He was
talking about his feelings about canoeing and paddling. I can’t remember what he told me,
and what I read in his books. I just remember that he was at camp when the Wilderness
Society was having their annual meeting there in 1962. Olaus Murie was there, but he
was pretty sick at that time. There was Sig, and we mostly discussed the problems in
McKinley Park.
MR. KAYE: Had you read Sig’s books at that time?
MS. WOOD: Not all of them, but some.
MR. KAYE: Some of them you had?
MS. WOOD: Yeah. See? I knew his son. I knew of him. And I always wanted to go on
a canoe trip up in that country. So I read some of his books. It didn’t strike me the way
Leopold did. It was interesting and good. Celia really should be here because he was on
her Board. She would give better in depth information. I can’t think of any. If I didn’t
know Sig Olsen, what you I have remembered about him? I think I was more interested
because he was Sig, Jr.’s Dad, and because I had read his book. Mostly we talked about
the problems in McKinley Park because that was when we felt like their idea was to see
how many people they could cram into it. He was telling me about the motor boat
problem in his country. He liked canoes and wilderness. And he felt that motor boats
would change wilderness. At that time, even the Park Service was at Boundary Waters.
It was the Forest Service. First you developed facilities and the Forest Service were my
heroes because they made the best trails. They used them for forest fire fighting. They
didn’t have them for cars. Sure, they sold lumber, but you didn’t see that. Where I grew
up at Lake Shallan was vast forest, Ponderosa Pine country. Everybody could use
lumber, there wasn’t a problem with that, but there was a marvelous trail system. It was
because they used them to patrol the forest.
MR. KAYE: Tell me about the Muries. Olaus and Mardy came here.
MS. WOOD: I got to know “Ad” much more. He and Weezie were living at Park
Headquarters when we first went. That winter is when they transferred out of there and
went to the Tetons. We just learned from him. Then in the Park, we could use Igloo
Camp Ground for our guests because nobody else was using it. It wasn’t developed. It
had pit toilets and that’s all. The surroundings there were entirely different from at the
other end of the Park where were. Within walking distance there was a lot of variety of
different things. Olaus would come down and talk to us around the campfire at night. Or
I would stop in and see him and ask him questions. I can remember Ad saying, “If I had
to do it over again, I’d have been an agronomist. You start with the soils, that’s the
foundation of everything”.
MR. KAYE: Oh really?
MS. WOOD: He said that he had gone backwards, beginning with the critters and then
going to other things. Olaus was always very friendly. We’d see him when we were
hiking around Igloo and we’d see that head of white hair. We’d go over there. One time
there was a lamb that had just been killed by an Eagle. We went over and he gave a little
talk about predators and prey in his very kindly way. Then he and Charlie Ott, a
photographer from town taking pictures in the Park and Ad; we’d meet them hiking. I
remember one time they came hiking over the hill. I was out with a group from camp and
we must have been stopped looking at one of those ponds, or doing birding or something.
They came hiking over the hills. I don’t what they had been doing but they were just
having fun. Mel Lockwood, who was the photographer said, “I have a permit to do this”.
And he showed me the permit. It was from Ad. It said, “Mel can collect plants”.
The Wilderness Society had their annual meeting in 1962 at camp. Sig Olsen and
all of those guys were there for a week. I think I first met Mardy at a Sierra Club meeting
down in Seattle. A friend of mine was hosting it at his house. He introduced me to
Mardy. Olaus, I had met because he’d come up sometimes and of course he had down a
lot of work in the Park in the 1920’s. All I remember is that he and Ad were sitting under
a tree. [end of side A]
Woody and I were out to get a car to bring back to camp, a new car. Celia had
flown down I guess, to see her folks. We were invited to come to an Audubon
Convention or meeting down in California. We were invited to come over and give a talk
on Alaska and show some pictures. There, Olaus Murie was one of the featured
speakers. I don’t remember Mardy at that time, but it was Olaus. I had met him with his
brother and sat down and had lunch with them. I knew his brother well, year after year.
Mardy I first met to really know her, I guess, was when she was at camp and Olaus was
very sick. In fact, that was the last year of his life. They were staying in the A frame and
he would not accept a ride in the Jeep, even though he was a sick man. But he would get
his camera out and take pictures of the moose on the lake and insist on wandering around
and hiking a little bit. That was when they left and it was a very short time before he
went in to the hospital. He had relapses, and this was one of them. When Mardy and
Olaus took off to go up and stay in the Brooks Range. They were going up to see where,
or what would be the best boundary for the western boundary of the Arctic Refuge, if
they could get it established. That when they were up at first Lobo Lake and then Last
Lake. Lobo Lake is drained now.
MR. KAYE: Did they come and stay here at your house for a visit?
MS. MURIE: They didn’t stay here. The only ones that ever stayed here were Weezy
Murie when she married again after Olaus died. She came up to visit and they stayed
overnight here. The morning that they left to go up for that thing in the Arctic; I had
known George Schaller because I sat next to him in class. And Brina had a breakfast
party up there. They were leaving the next morning. I know the exact date because
Rommey was six days old. She was born on May 8th. So it was in late May when they
were leaving to go up.
MR. KAYE: So, you knew George Schaller?
MS. WOOD: Yeah, that was in one of Brina’s classes that I took. She taught everything.
In fact, George used to say that it would look funny on his resume when it showed that
he had gotten all of his Botany, Zoology from Brina Kessel! She ran the University!
And he was always hungry. He as always chewing on a stalk of celery or something in
class. Then, the other guy that went up with them was Kreer. He was a close friend of
Les and Terry’s when they were running the science school and we were skiing with
them. Woody knew him. They weren’t in the same outfit, but they were both in the
Mountain Division [Army] in Italy. We used to ski with him.
MR. KAYE: When Olaus and Mardie came back, in 1957 after their summer up on the
lake, they met with a lot of groups here in Fairbanks; conservation groups and
sportsmen’s groups. Do you remember that summer? Or would you have been in camp?
MS. WOOD: I don’t remember Olaus being along. I remember after he died, she came
back several times. I remember when the Conservation Society had a big picnic for her at
Larry Males. Then, she and a friend of hers had an old bus that they could sleep in. It
was one of those convertibles. Her name was Mildred Capron. She took movies, and she
was a neat lady. She and Mardy kid of ran around together after Olaus died. She lived in
one of the cabins at Moose. They came up and toured with that thing on the road
system, camping. And they came to our camp and parked down by where the cars were.
They stayed around for a while. We used to visit at the Ranch, when we were outside to
get a car we tried to visit if the weather was right. It was always wintertime and
sometimes you couldn’t get over the mountain. And if you did get over, you were afraid
you might not get back. If the passes were good, we’d go over and see Mardy and stay
there. When she was in Seattle, she was a friend of a close friend of mine. I would see her
there. And sometimes I would just go and see her, she was staying with her mother when
she was still alive. It was after Olaus died and I think she lived there for a while to take
care of her mother who was in her late eighties. There’s just little vignettes of Mardy and
the times that we had stayed on the Ranch.
MR. KAYE: I’ve just a couple more things. One thing I noticed through your writing
was that you talked about the pioneering philosophy in Alaska, in reference to the Arctic
Refuge. It’s almost as if, in your writings, you appreciate the frontier, but you didn’t
appreciate the pioneer attitude towards Alaska.
MS. WOOD: I think I used “pioneer” I would now use the word “frontier”. Frontier
attracts the best and the worst. And frontier means that you came up to exploit it, really.
Whether is was the west, or the pioneers that first came over to colonize New England; a
lot of them had to get out of where they were, or they were failures looking for a new
opportunity. So you got the scoundrels. If you got there first, you could start the first
business or exploit it. Rarely did you explore it, even though you get honored for being a
pioneer. Or else you were escaping persecution like the pilgrims or the Mormons. I
think Wally Stegner, who was at camp too. His writings were things that I really admired.
I didn’t get to know him much. But he made the comment that frontier…. Oh, I can’t
remember…I’ll find it for you. I used to have it posted up here. I think his concept of
frontier, because he grew up in the frontier of southern Canada up in the wheat and cattle
country. Then they moved down. He grew up in the 1920’s in the harsh reality of the
frontier. He said that with frontier, yes, you were opening up the country but in doing
that you’ve lost what you came for. He makes that in a very nice statement and I’ll see if
I can find it for you. The frontier was the place that you come to find the things that you
lose after you get there.
MR. KAYE: So I guess in that context, in your testimony, you didn’t want the Arctic
Refuge to be a frontier in that sense?
MS. WOOD: One of the other people I got to know was Jack Reid who was head of the
Geological Survey. I flew him from McKinley Park back up here. He was the one who
said, “I told the Muries that they should stay east of the Canning River, because right
there, there’s a big disconnect in the geology, and they’ll find oil.” They hadn’t even
found Prudhoe Bay then. But he said that they were going to find oil, and in pretty good
amounts, somewhere. But if you stay east, then they’d fine little seeps. He said there
were entirely different structures, and he explained it to me geologically; the chances of
finding any big find there. It was not very much later that they found Prudhoe Bay.
The other thing is when they were talking to Olaus and Mardy and Collins and
everybody; their concept was to find a place that was big enough so it would have all of
the biomes from the marine, the tundra, the alpine and the arboreal forest over the hill, and
big enough so that your ecosystem wasn’t just this little one. There also would be no
village except Potomac, no mining, or mining claims. The timber wasn’t big enough to cut.
It had no resources that anybody was interested in, or had someone to suggest that there
was until Prudhoe Bay. Even then, it was Jack Reid, who told me as I was flying him
back, that he had just told Olaus that. They were going up to find the logical boundary,
and it was originally a lot smaller. Then at some point it changed from the Range to the
Refuge. The more described what it was. Then, I remember Stevens. He was saying that
he wound’ t give one bit of money for managing it. And we said, “Goody, Goody,
Goody!”
MR. KAYE: That was Bartlett who said that, the Senator.
MS. WOOD: Was it!? I thought it was Stevens.
MR. KAYE: Stevens wasn’t a Senator yet.
MS. WOOD: But I think he got it from Stevens. We had already started the
Conservation Society and I remember we used to have a meeting each week. None of us
had telephones where we slept. We always had a bag lunch at the University. Any body
could come and sit in on it. It was very informal. We hadn’t had a constitution yet.
Everybody just put on the table what they had learned. It was a gossip thing. And with
all of the different disciplines, it was “well did you hear this?” or “Did you here that?”
When we heard the comment “Not one cent!”, we thought that was great!
MR. KAYE: You thought that would protect the area?
MS. WOOD: Yeah! A lot of times, when they manage it, that’s what the problem is!
MR. KAYE: I see that Bartlett, according to your notes and editorials in the New
Bulletin, as it was called then, met with you a couple of times. He was against the Refuge
Proposal.
MS. WOOD: I remember that hearing. That’s the only one I remember actually sitting
around him. That’s the one that is in the minutes of the Congressional Record. It’s
whatever I said there, you must have that. Because actually, Bartlett, who was an old
miner himself, and pretty much a developer, was so polite and cordial. Nobody put you
down or called you an extreme environmentalist. There were other people who did that.
The miners didn’t want the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society telling them how to
run Alaska. Bartlett was very kind and very… It wasn’t like when you used to have to
testify in front of Stevens, and Don Young later. They would just insult you. I
remember when I testified, and I had never done anything like that, I had a written
testimony and then he asked me some questions. I remember him saying, “Mrs. Wood,
do you know you have given an excellent testimony?” I thought, “Oh my gosh!”
Because I didn’t know what I had said, or …
MR. KAYE: Well, I have it here. He said, “Mrs. Wood, in my opinion, that was an
exceptionally well prepared and well presented testimony.”
MS. WOOD: Oh, it that what he said? I just remember that he complimented me on it.
MR. KAYE: Your words are extremely eloquent in describing the values in this place.
MS. WOOD: I think I read the whole thing. We just did it for… oh what’s his name?
The guy that was Fred Dean’s boss at the University. He was in charge of the Pittman
Roberts…
MR. KAYE: Funding.
MS. WOOD: Funding, and he was over Fred, and he was at the University. Very
shortly after that he was taken back to Washington, D. C. What’s the big Refuge near
there. Well, he was made head of that, so he left here. But it was such a small town and a
small community, you knew everybody. You knew everybody who came to visit.
MR. KAYE: So it was the Arctic Refuge campaign that kind of galvanized ACS?
MS. WOOD: I remember meeting in the hallway after we had had this testimony and the
ones of us that I mentioned, we said that what we needed to do after hearing those people
say that they didn’t want “outside environmentalists” telling them how to run Alaska,
was that …. We all were card carrying members of the Wilderness Society and the Sierra
Club and the Wildlife Federation. You paid your little dues of five dollars or whatever it
was. Woody and I had been members of the Sierra Club since he was finishing his degree
his Forestry at CAL, because they had those wonderful hut systems that you could use if
you were members, for skiing. Mostly the Sierra Club was an outdoors club. It started in
Yosemite. I remember Dave Brower. We were outside and Brower heard we were there
and he asked us into his office. He said that he wanted to have a hike up in Alaska in
McKinley Park. He wanted it for seventy-five people! Woody and I just said we
couldn’t take seventy-five people. He said, “You don’t know how well organized we do
our trips.” They didn’t even understand the situation. We said that you can’t have
seventy-five. They wanted to know if we’d run it. And we said, “Not with seventy-five
people!” Then, when Celia was in the Wilderness Society, I said that they were sending
up trips of fifteen people. I was guiding them up in the Brooks Range. Their program
was to get more people into the wilderness so they could get more people to speak for it.
I told Celia that I was embarrassed to have that many people up in the Brooks Range. I
said, “I don’t like to come in at Kartobik. The last time in, we had all our camping gear
and they couldn’t put on all of the first freight that they had been waiting for, for food.
That’s too many people to have in the wilderness!” Not only for what it does to the…it
becomes a social occasion, rather that it being the wilderness there and you have
companionship. It isn’t just yack, yack, yack all of the time and you don’t even notice
where you are. The other thing is for a guide, is you get up there and you; Wing Airlines
was running daily flights and we’d go up on that; you had to got to Kartobik and you had
to get Wallady or somebody to fly you back up into the mountains for the trip. You have
to go two by two because usually it was a small plane. You just don’t have big planes.
Then you have your grub. You have to divide up the people and they have never even
been up in there before. Here you are sending them out, two by two, and have to sure
that everybody has tents, food, gas, prime stoves and equipment whether you go with the
first group or not, as they go. Pretty soon, you’ve got more out there than you’ve got
here, but you’ve got to be sure that everyone has what they need. If you can’t do it all in
one day, or it takes two or three days because of weather, then you have people stuck.
And they don’t know that you have to do this. The thing is, if you’re going to have small
group, don’t have too many people. Then you can all do the same thing. That was a
horrible thing. And I told Celia that I didn’t want any more people from the Wilderness
Society. “I am embarrassed to come in with that many people”. The Sierra Club was
having twenty-five people then. I told them that I would meet some, not very often but
once in a while. I would not take that many people on a trip.
It was as much for me, as it was for the wilderness. The main thing was, The Sierra Club,
with seventy-five people? That’s just a convention!
MR. KAYE: I am about out of questions. I just want to ask you if there is anything
you’d like to say about the Arctic Refuge; looking back on the purpose, the value of it, or
anything you’d like to say about it.
MS. WOOD: I spent from 1960 to what it is now, almost 2003. I am still sending letters
and working. When Celia died, that was the last thing we were doing was putting up
tacks to go in. She was on the phone to Debbie Miller asking who the Senators were who
were on the fence. She was taking a list of them. She’d come back and we’d write our
little things. We said that it was getting to be eleven o’clock and we’d go to Sam’s; he’s a
geologist who has his own office and fax machine; we’ll going over in the morning and
send them, why don’t we knock it off and go to bed? So we did. She went downstairs,
and she never came up.
MR. KAYE: That was the last thing that Celia did?
MS. WOOD: That was the last thing. We were up until eleven o’clock at night. The last
person she talked to was Debbie Miller. Debbie had been just back from there. We asked
her “who were the guys who were on the fence?” We never did send them. I was writing
mine, and she was writing hers. She said that she would type mine up and we’d get over
to Sam’s in the morning and use his fax. It was a weekend anyway. The next morning, I
got up; usually she was the first one up. She was always hungry early and wanted to eat.
Sometimes we ate together and sometimes we didn’t. I thought, she’d just been back
from being gone for a month outside. Then she’d come home and gone to one of
Conservation Foundation meetings down in Anchorage. I thought well, I’ll fix her a nice
breakfast and not oatmeal, “I’ll make her an omelet”, because we didn’t do that very
often. I kept pounding on the floor and thought she was probably on the computer and
couldn’t hear me. I went down at about 10 o’clock, and there she was on the floor!
Just looking like she had laid down to sleep! Her face was calm, and she had her clothes
on. She had her [sounds like] bucks eye so she could see out her window at the view.
You had to go down a little ladder. She had gone down that ladder. There was no anguish
or any thing like she has choked on something or had a stroke or anything. It wasn’t as if
she had collapsed. She may have decided to so some meditation. She had on her grubbies,
I don’t know if she slept in them or whether it was a sweat suit. She may have gotten up
to do some exercises. She had mentioned that she was out of shape and that she had
better start doing some exercises. Then, “well, I’m a little tired, I’ll just lie down for a
minute”, or something, I don’t know. Who knows? But what a way to go!?
It was sure a shock! We had been skiing just a couple of days before. We didn’t have
much snow but we could go down to Smith Lake and ski around there, just to ski. I
remember we’d had done that. We had made one trip on our trail up around Les Verrick’s
land and decided that there too.. we said, “Let’s not do this any more.” We agreed that
unless we got more snow, there were too many roots and things sticking up and we’d
better go together. You could trip and fall and break something and be out there. We
always did that individually. But we decided that until we got more snow, we’d plan to
say together.
MR. KAYE: It’s certainly interesting that that is the last thing she worked on.
MS. WOOD: The trip she made outside was sort of a pilgrimage. I thought we were
going to go in the spring, together and do some hiking. I said that maybe we ought to
think about the dates for the spring and she said, “Well, I’ve already made mine, I am
going this fall”. She said she knew just where she was going, and who she was going to
see. She didn’t say anything like, “why don’t you come?” And we couldn’t anyway,
somebody had to close up it was wintertime. You had to get all of the garden stuff in and
your wood chopped. And there is all the stuff you have to put away. Usually winter
comes at the first of October with the snow. After that, it’s going to stay.
MR. KAYE: I am glad I was able to talk to Celia. I wish I would have recorded her about
her thoughts on the Refuge.
MS. WOOD: She would have had…She was top dog and head of a lot of …during the
Nilka, she was on the Land Use Planning Commission for the feds. They sent plane in to
land on Wonder Lake. You don’t land on Wonder Lake. It was a Widgeon, I think. Who
was bringing this in? I found out that it was somebody to come and talk to her. The next
think I knew she had been selected to be one of the members of the Board for the feds.
Before that she had been on the Board of the Wilderness Society and then, Chairman of
the Board. She was with the feds when they were looking at all of the different areas.
She spent the next two summers being mostly gone flying all over. That’s when she was
with Mardy. I was running camp. She’d pop in for two weeks and be off for two weeks,
that got kind of old. We were trying to decide; she’s got so many opportunities, do we
want to run camp any longer? What do we do with this? It was like having a bear by the
tail. If Wally and Jerry hadn’t come along and made the offer, because they had worked
for us and we knew who they were. We knew their ethics. Wally was perfectly capable
of doing it and would do a good job. We would never be ashamed that we sold to him.
Now, boy, has he got something by the tail? That place is worth so many millions of
dollars, no one could afford to but except for maybe Princess Tours. But he would never
sell it to them. Someone would put a hotel there. Then, we kept twelve acres and kept
two cabins so we’d have a place where we could go through the Park. So we’re
landholders, too. And it’s been assessed at half a million dollars just because it’s got a
view of McKinley. At most, it’s twelve acres of permafrost except the one place where
we’ve got the A frame. You are caught with that, and you’re…. Celia willed her part of it
to Romney. Wally almost had it through so we could sell our development rights to the
Park Service. It means that you would never get any bigger. You could repair anything
that needed repairing, but you could never have anything more. The Park Service would
buy it, and we’d get some money and we could still operate it, but under this condition.
Then, that would reduce what it was worth for anybody that wanted to make a million
dollars. And you know who stopped it? Mikowski. Individually. I have talked to
people that were back there with the Department of the Interior. They said Mikowski
was the one. They said he wants to have that opened up to big tourism. And he wants a
road or a railroad into Cantishna. He’s backing that. And he just personally did it to stop
Camp Denali. And of course we wanted to do the same thing. Because Celia Hunter was
one of the owners. That’s really stopped us, because that’s what we’d do. If we could
see that whoever did buy it own it or when we bequeathed it, it never could be anything
more than what it already it except to maintain it. We wouldn’t even give it to the Park
Service because they’d probably put a maintenance station there, a road crew at least,
down at our place and get gravel out of it.
MR. KAYE: Well, I have taken a lot of your time. Is there anything you want to say
finally, about the Refuge?
MS. WOOD: I keep forgetting that I am being recorded for posterity. But as I say, it’s
trying to, as this stage at the end of my life, trying to figure out what I thought about
then. When you are looking at it in retrospect, and you get mixed up with how feel now
and how you felt then.
MS. KAYE: How do you feel now?
MS. WOOD: Well, I’m just glad I was born when I was. Boy, I have… when I see what
happened with the elections, and everybody that got elected. The programs are saying
that we’ve got these vast resources here, we don’t need to have taxes, we don’t need to do
anything but develop them. Mikowski says that we should start with roads. You build
roads into the wild and get all of the land in private ownership so private business can
develop it. You’d think they’d have learned something from Enron and that stuff. Every
day you read the paper and there is somebody exposing these big corporations. His idea
that all you do is get the roads to them and it there. You get more fish and more timber
and more oil. But you’ve got to make access. So you build more roads in the forest and
you make…then you stop and limit any restrictions on private enterprise that’s doing
this. And then, Alaska will be rich, and people will be rich, and we’ll all be prosperous.
We’ll get bigger and bigger with more growth, and more money. That’s his concept. He
went broke running a Bank! Am I still on here? I don’t know what he knows about the
economy!
MR. KAYE: So.,.
MS. WOOD: By the way, have you read…if you want to talk economics…you know,
that’s how we stopped Rampart Dam, based on economics alone. We couldn’t talk about
the ducks. In fact when Celia was in the debate with the guy who was a Senator, he
shook his fist and said that she was talking about ducks and geese and moose, and you’re
not talking about those things, you’re talking about economics! And that’s not your field!
She was proving that it was not economical to dam the Yukon. And that power, by the
time they got it down there, wouldn’t be very cheap! In fact, an economist who was
from Michigan and very well known, did a study on it right after that. That’s what he
stopped it. And we really broadcast that. He said the same thing we were saying, but he
did it as a scientific economist and not as an environmentalist, and that’s what stopped
that.
MR. KAYE: Let me ask a final question. You played important roles in the Refuge
campaign, the Rampart Dam, Project Chariot, I mean your whole Alaskan life, at least in
the last few decades, has been leadership roles in conservation. Why have you spent so
much time and energy?
MS. WOOD: Well we didn’t. If I hadn’t been doing other things, going on tangents, first
flying around the country and then with Camp Denali. Let me just make this statement;
In those days environmental concerns came one at a time, and they were black and white.
If you did a little homework, and you didn’t have to do it very far because you knew
everybody that was connected with it, and was there and saw it and made the decisions.
That was what Alaska was. Now, your issues come multiplied, and they come in many
shades of gray. You don’t always have access to know. You don’t happen to have just
had dinner with the guy that was the key person in that, so it’s become much more
complicated. That’s why the Alaska Conservation Society, in 1980, still had money and
some influence but Bob Wheedon was asked by Hammond to be an advisor. And Celia
had a chance to go back to Washington, D. C. and be head of the Wilderness Society.
There were so few of us left to run it. And it was getting so we realized that you couldn’t
operate out of living rooms. You had to have fax and Xerox machines. You had to have
telephones and an office and people working there. You couldn’t do it on just volunteers.
Before, it was kind of fun. It was kind of like David slaying Goliath. All you had to have
was…then, people could hitchhike to a meeting and make a speech. But it was so easy to
get the facts and know somebody that was there. It was not like it is now. That’s why
we decided to go out of business while we were ahead. We divided up the money that we
had and gave it to the centers that were starting up in Juneau. That was an organization
of a lot of different environmental organizations. That was Seeak. But we started first up
here with Environmental Center, and then Seeak and Anchorage was the last one to come
in, but they have ACE, for the same reasons. So we divided all of the money between
them. And then there were small organizations that were chapters of ours. We started
out just in Fairbanks. They people would write us and say that they had this “little
bonfire” down here, well we felt like they knew more about it than we did, so we told
them to start their own. We had a lot of organizations that are still going as a group,
independently. They aren’t part of the Seeak, but I guess they cooperate with them.
This all started because they were going to log their favorite recreational river that
everybody goes hunting and camping and fishing on. And they said, “Not in our back
yard!” They knew the issues, and we told them to fight, and they did. That’s what
happened with all the others. We never went out trying to start one. They would write
us and ask what we could do about it up there. And we’d tell them just organize like we
did. We became, with all of these satellite ones. But it got too big to handle. And you
have to have all of this money now. And you have to have all of this machinery. And
you have to have all of these people that work, that give their lives to it. You can’t just
operate it as a bunch of volunteers out of living rooms and kitchens. So that’s the
difference. And you ask, “Why did you do it?” It was fun! And it was interesting, and
you met the neatest people.
MR. KAYE: But you’ve continued on, and you’ve done so much more than just about
anyone!
MS. WOOD: I think that maybe I am a “has-been”. Celia loved it. Oh gad, I wanted to
be out skiing, hiking. I wanted to be out smelling the flowers instead of writing about
them. I can’t spell very well. And I purposely haven’t learned how to do a computer. I
don’t want to spend my life down there with email. Regular mail is bad enough. Camp
was part camp, and part…Well you know we had an educational thing going on while you
were out. You were a bird expert! The people that came there. We were asked how we
could stand those tourists. Some of them were a pain in the neck, but very few. I met
some of the my best friends, and people who had that as their field who I could from. I
learned as much from the guests as I taught them. I think it was a joy, just going out and
discovering things together like I did. Discovering and learning new things, and being out
in it! I wanted people to understand…they all thought you had to see a wolf and a bear
and a caribou migration, and then they could go on to the next thing, they had been there,
they’d done it. And if they don’t see it, they thought it wasn’t all what it was cracked up
to be. The thing is, like I used to tell my people who were waiting for the plane to come;
just go out, and sit down and see what you see. Quit pacing around when the plane is
going to come. If you don’t get back to your board meeting, well, you got trapped in the
Arctic! Wouldn’t that make a good story?! The plane didn’t come, and there we were,
abandoned! I have had on my trips wonderful, interesting people. And I have learned as
much as I have probably given. So that’s why I could do it. And what would you be
doing if you weren’t doing that? You’d have to go and get a job. In the War because I had
good eyesight I could qualify to fly all of those fighter planes; if I hadn’t, I would have
been making airplanes like everybody else was. People your age don’t know what a war
is, and we didn’t get bombed. We didn’t have to go down in the tunnels or take our
family down under ground during a bombing raid. But, your father could only get enough
gasoline for his job. And it was rationed. All ski and other resorts were closed. There
wasn’t any pleasure trips. You didn’t drive a car to do that. There was a war on! There
was a lot of things you couldn’t get. I happened to be flying and that was as good a way
as any to spend the War. But here, they just don’t understand. Certain people went off
and got killed or maimed and fought a war, but business was good because they could sell
a lot of things during the war, until after the war, and then you have a depression. The big
Depression was because of World War I. You destroy a lot of things, and you have to
make up for it. People are out of jobs. Then you find out that you’ve got to do
something about the people who got wounded and take care of them. Social services go
up. During the war, there’s jobs because half the people are off fighting it and the others
can get the jobs and get paid. People are selling things. Munitions and manufacturers and
commerce is good. Then you have a depression afterwards. I think people that grew up
since World War II have never known what it is to be rationed. They don’t what it is to
really have somebody that you love get killed. It was just poor people who went off and
fought Viet Nam, mostly. Bush has certainly never experienced that, or he wouldn’t be
so hot to get into another war. I think that that is why people voted the way they did,
because they promised growth and prosperity. If you read Lester Brown’s book
Ecoecomonics. If you go into the economics of this instead of saving the wilderness; and
it’s not that saving the wilderness isn’t important, but I think that now we always talk
about prosperity and improving the standard of living. I think that because there are so
many of us, and resources are diminishing, that we are going to have to shoot for
sustainability. You don’t have to starve to death in the dark to do it. We were just as
happy when were in the cabin that didn’t have anything. We thought it was great. It was
warm, and it was our house! I think that if you don’t get sustainability, the next thing is
going to be survival. That’s not very pretty. It won’t be the big corporations that has
and gets, it’s going to be everybody out for yourself to try and get enough eat and enough
water and enough everything! We don’t have to do that. We can have a good, high
standard of living, a high standard of life and have a very high well being index, which
should be the real judge of your economy, if we start now to shoot for sustainability and
not for prosperity where them that has, gets, and for the others that’s tough. Let them
eat cake! In any case, that’s the way I see it now, and I’m not going to be around to find
out how it all comes out. But I always seemed to be the right age, at the right time, in the
right place. Just the luck of the draw, and I was very very grateful for that. Where I grew
up, I always felt that anybody who didn’t live in a small town or on a farm had a
deprived childhood. Any body who wasn’t free to roam around the woods….I don’t like
rules and regulations either. But as soon as you have growth you have to have them. We
didn’t have a stop sign in Fairbanks when I got here. I could tell if a car was coming, so
could everybody else! We didn’t hit moose, and we didn’t hit each other. Now, we have
stop lights and you have to wait for it to go through all it’s things. It takes me much
longer to get to the airport than it used to! If you didn’t, you’d have nothing but crashes.
I think that we have been too comfortable, it’s been too easy. If you weren’t prosperous,
you could go to drugs and make money there. Or, forget about it all if you were using
them. We’ve got a whole population, which is put too much stock in growth and
prosperity, and profits and fraud. If you can’t make it one way, you’ll make it another.
And I think, even as a child growing up in the Depression, there wasn’t violence. When I
was a kid I could wander all over town and talk to anybody. There have always been
mean people. There have always been robbers. Murder was something that you hardly
ever heard of in your town. We didn’t know what that meant. I think we’ve lost a sense
of integrity and too many people have walked on nothing but sidewalks and cement in
their whole life. Maybe they are good people. And they think they are comfortable in
their condominium and their job, but they have never know what it is to walk on earth.
And they never notice things like that. Even driving a car. It’s all road rage now. You do
the flying by push buttons. You have to notice what’s under you! Like you and I
learned! You have to navigate on the ground and be conscious of where you are and
where you’d put it if that engine quit! Now, they don’t, they just dial where their
destination is and doing pay any attention.
MR. KAYE: Well, our tape is almost done.
MS. WOOD: Well good.
MR. KAYE: I want to thank you.
MS. WOOD: And that’s the end of that speech and I’ll get back to sorting my stuff.